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THE DISCOURSE OF CULTURAL LEADERSHIP

Jonathan Francis Richard Price

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Robert Gordon University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This research was carried out in connection with the On The Edge research programme at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK

Funded by the Innovation, Design and Sustainability Research Institute (IDEAS)

February 2016

Abstract

The discourse of cultural leadership Cultural leadership has been a key concept in cultural policy and training since 2002. Most closely associated with the UK’s Clore Leadership Programme, it has been developed through various courses and initiatives domestically and internationally, initially as a response to crises of financial management and governance within major cultural institutions. This emergence of cultural leadership coincided with growing political interest in the social benefits of the arts and the economic potential of the creative industries. However, the concept is rarely clearly defined or critically analysed, while the political and economic environment in which the cultural sector operates has been transformed since the term was coined.

This research investigates the evolution of cultural leadership as a discursive formation in these contexts. It traces the short history of the term itself and situates it within longer trajectories of cultural policy. Through critical discourse analysis the research questions the relationship between ‘cultural leadership’ and ‘cultural leaders’, asking who creates the circumstances in which art is produced and culture shaped. Leadership itself is reconsidered theoretically as an aspect of political action. Detailed interviews with influential cultural sector professionals are analysed as an empirical complement to literature around cultural history, policy and artistic leadership.

The analysis reconfigures cultural leadership as a dynamic process arising from relationships between creative practice and social, political and organisational development. Outlining the respective roles of government, the public and the sector, it proposes a framework for understanding leadership through the interplay of action and influence within and beyond the cultural workforce. Indicating that cultural leadership has a vital critical role to play in democratic society, the research argues for more effective engagement between sectoral leaders, including artists, and questions of policy and cultural value. Its findings are significant for the future study and development of cultural leadership nationally and internationally.

Keywords: culture, leadership, cultural leadership, discourse, cultural policy, artists, art and society, democracy.

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To Ellie

Acknowledgements

Preparing a Ph.D. is far from the solitary journey that some might imagine it to be and, as anyone who’s tried it will tell you, it’s your family, friends and fellow travellers who make the whole thing possible. Sincere thanks are due:

To my principal supervisor, Professor Anne Douglas, who has given so generously of her time, energy and intellect to this research. Without Anne’s previous work this opportunity would not have existed, so, on many levels, thank you. Also to my other supervisors Professor Paul Harris (years 1 and 2) and Dr Robert Halsall (year 3), whose different forms of expertise and shared enthusiasm for the research have been enormously helpful.

To all my participating interviewees who gave freely of their valuable time and considerable insight. Also to Stephan Wynants of EACEA, who helped set up the interviews with Barbara and Arnaud, and special thanks to François Matarasso and Chris Fremantle, who made additional time for me at various points on the way. Chris’s role in the Artist as Leader research alongside Anne was foundational to this work.

To the superb community of research students at Gray’s of which I have been fortunate to be a part. Drs Chu Chu Yuan, Helen Smith, Melehat Nil Gülari and Peter Buwert showed me the ropes while Caroline Gausden, Hilal Bugali and everyone from the DART and Reading Group sessions helped keep me going. Special thanks to Hilal for her expert work on the illustrations for this thesis and to Caroline, Lance and Guyatri for welcoming me into their home.

To my parents, Peter and Jennifer Price, who have been there for me throughout with kind words, interest and encouragement.

Above all, to my wife Elaine, whose strength, wisdom and patience I have no adequate words to describe, but to whom this thesis is dedicated with love.

Table of contents

Abstract iii Acknowledgements v Table of contents vii List of figures xii List of appendices xii

Chapter 1: Introduction to the research 1

1.1. Background to the research 1

1.2. Questions, scope and assumptions 4 1.2.1. Cultural leadership as discourse 4 1.2.2. A personal perspective 4 1.2.3. Questioning cultural leadership 5

1.3. Thesis chapter outlines 6 1.3.1. Chapter 2: Method and theory 6 1.3.2. Chapter 3: Literature review and analysis 7 1.3.3. Chapter 4: The experience of cultural leadership: interview analysis 9 1.3.4. Chapter 5: Spheres of cultural leadership 11 1.3.5. Chapter 6: Conclusions 12

1.4. A note on definitions: culture, art and creativity 14

Chapter 2: Method and theory 17

2.1. Overview 17

2.2. Theoretical framework: principles of analysis 17 2.2.1. Understanding cultural leadership as a discursive construction 17

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2.2.2. Discourse analysis as interpretive perspective 20 2.2.3. Arendt’s theory of action 22

2.3. Interviews and interviewees 25

2.4. Uses of literature 35

2.5. Events, discussions, networks 37

Chapter 3: Literature review and analysis 39

3.1 Role and typology of literature in the research 39

3.2 From arts administration to cultural leadership 40

3.3 The establishment of cultural leadership 42

3.4 Artists as Leaders 45 3.4.1. Culture means business 45 3.4.2. Scenarios of artistic leadership 46 3.4.3. International dimensions of cultural leadership 50

3.5 Deeper waters: the cultural policy context 52 3.5.1. The background to arts funding in Britain 52 3.5.2. Cultural industries and the creativity agenda 56 3.5.3. Values and identity in cultural policy and leadership 63

3.6 Theories and concepts of leadership 65

3.7 New stages for cultural leadership 68

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Chapter 4: The experience of cultural leadership 73 Analysis of research interviews

4.1. Range and purpose of research interviews 73

4.2. The cultural uses of leadership 74 4.2.1. Conceptions of leadership 75 4.2.2. Definitions of cultural leadership 78 4.2.3. Self-image and leadership style 84 4.2.4. Relating to others: cultural leadership as Arendtian action 88

4.3. Inhabiting the concepts 92 4.3.1. Language, rhetoric and discourse 92 4.3.2. Creative and cultural industries 96 4.3.3. The meanings of resilience 101

4.4. Quality and value 104 4.4.1. From principle to process 104 4.4.2. Unfortunate complexity: other qualities of culture 107 4.4.3. A question of trust 112

4.5. Relating to policy 116 4.5.1. Politicians and political influence 116 4.5.2. Advocacy 119 4.5.3. Funding 122 4.5.4. The legacy of managerialism 127

4.6. International perspectives 128 4.6.1. Internationalism as competence 128 4.6.2. Changing international relations: the case of the British Council 129 4.6.3. Other methods 131 4.6.4. Pattern and perspective 132

4.7. Locating the artist 133 4.7.1. Acting in the world 134

4.7.2. Beauty as politics 137 4.7.3. Aesthetics and identity: the Phoenix Dance story 139

4.8. Leading cultural organisations 140 4.8.1. Constructed vehicles: purposes & limits of cultural organisations 141 4.8.2. Structure and culture 142 4.8.3. Wilful organisations 144

4.9. The public sphere 146 4.9.1. The relational turn 147 4.9.2. Community and public benefit 149

4.10. Cultural leadership training 152 4.10.1. Change-making: The Clore Leadership Programme 153 4.10.2. Other voices 156 4.10.3. Further directions 158

Chapter 5: Spheres of cultural leadership 161

5.1. The critical practice of cultural leadership 161 5.1.1. Leadership and authority 162 5.1.2. Art and contingency 164

5.2. Culture, policy and the public 167 5.2.1. The foundation of trust 167 5.2.2. Three dynamics 174

5.3. A framework for cultural leadership 179 5.3.1. Spheres of action 180 5.3.2. Spheres of influence 183

5.4. Summary 185

Chapter 6: Conclusions 187

6.1. Locating cultural leadership 187 6.1.1. Hybrid content, relational style 188 6.1.2. Culture and charisma 189 6.1.3. The place of the artist in cultural leadership 191

6.2. Policy, leadership and value 193 6.2.1. Policy and uncertainty 193 6.2.2. Translation and articulation 195 6.2.3. Policy and training 196

6.3. The evolution of cultural leadership 197 6.3.1. A continuing crisis 197 6.3.2. Who needs cultural leadership? 200

6.4. Limitations of the research and further questions 202 6.4.1. Equality and cultural leadership 202 6.4.2. Range and scope of contributors 203

6.5. The exchange of action and influence 204

References 207

Appendices CD

List of Figures

All figures by Jonathan Price with design by Hilal Bugali.

Figure 1: Culture, government and the public 174

Figure 2: The experience of policy and governance? 177

Figure 3: Spheres of cultural leadership 180

List of appendices

Appendices are included as pdf files on a CD accompanying hard copies of this thesis but the interviews are not stored online. Please contact the author for further details.

Interview transcriptions: Appendix 1: Janet Archer, Edinburgh, 1 December 2014. Appendix 2: James Brining, Leeds, 17 January 2014. Appendix 3: Roanne Dods, Glasgow, 19 May 2014. Appendix 4: Chris Fremantle, Glasgow, 27 June 2013. Appendix 5: Dawn Fuller and Emma Tregidden, Leeds, 23 October 2014. Appendix 6: Barbara Gessler, Brussels, 10 April 2014. Appendix 7: Suzy Glass, Glasgow, 27 June 2013. Appendix 8: Sue Hoyle, London, 17 October 2014. Appendix 9: Cluny Macpherson, Leeds, 20 October 2014. Appendix 10: James Marriott, London, 11 June 2013. Appendix 11: François Matarasso, Aberdeen, 13 March 2013. Appendix 12: Andrew Ormston, Edinburgh, 31 January 2014. Appendix 13: Arnaud Pasquali, Brussels, 10 April 2014. Appendix 14: Ferdinand Richard, Gateshead, 11 October 2014. Appendix 15: Pablo Rossello, London, 17 October 2014. Appendix 16: Jane Spiers, Aberdeen, 6 November 2014. Appendix 17: Julie Ward, Durham, 26 October 2014. Appendix 18: Sharon Watson, Leeds, 22 September 2014.

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Articles and conference papers:

Appendix 19: Price, J, Douglas. A. & Harris, P. 2013 Values and assumptions in the concept of cultural leadership. European Conference on Arts & Humanities Official Conference Proceedings: 398-412.

Appendix 20: Price, J., 2013. Community and its discontents: in search of the positive opposite. Paper developed for Meaningless Meanings, Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University.

Appendix 21: Price, J., 2013. The ethical dimensions of cultural policy. 12th International Conference ‘European Culture’, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Barcelona, 24-26th October.

Appendix 22: Price, J., 2015. Contesting agendas of participation in the arts. Journal of Arts & Communities, 7:1/2, 17-31.

Appendix 23: Price, J., 2015. The art of valuing. Online account of IETM seminar event, published 4th March (ontheedgeresearch.org).

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Chapter 1: Introduction to the research

1.1. Background to the research

This thesis is the result of a Ph.D. studentship originally developed at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen in early 2012 to investigate the roles, processes and implications of cultural leadership. It forms part of the On The Edge research programme at Gray’s, supported by the IDEAS research institute at Robert Gordon University. On The Edge, directed by Professor Anne Douglas, has a longstanding engagement with discourse around artistic and cultural leadership. Douglas has been the principal supervisor for this studentship and was co-author with Chris Fremantle of the Artist as Leader research report (Douglas & Fremantle 2009), the final outcome of a multifaceted two year investigation into the nature of artistic leadership and influence (2006-8). The Artist as Leader work included an AHRC funded research project running alongside an intensive, residential ‘laboratory’ event (led by Susan Benn of Performing Arts Labs, London) which involved numerous individual artists as well as institutional leaders from across the UK arts sector.1 It also produced an a-n special edition, Leading Through Practice (Douglas & Fremantle 2007) and coincided with an Artist as Leader performance programme at London’s Southbank Centre (2008), whose Artistic Director Jude Kelly was herself a participant in the research.2 This work aroused the interest of the Clore Leadership Programme which established a series of ‘Artist Fellowships’ in response (Hoyle 2014b: 14). The first such award went to artist Joshua Sofaer, who subsequently developed a series of interviews and articles in response to the Artist as Leader research under the same title.3

At the time of the Artist as Leader project cultural leadership was high on the national agenda. The Clore Leadership Programme had been established in 2004 in response to a report commissioned by the Clore Duffield Foundation from Robert Hewison and

1 The Lab element of Artist as Leader was produced as a collaboration between Benn, Douglas, Deborah Keogh (Cultural Enterprise Office, Glasgow), Zoe van Zwanenberg (Scottish Leadership Foundation, Edinburgh) and theatre director Tim Nunn (Douglas & Fremantle 2009: 3). The background to the project is explained further in 3.4.2 below. 2 www.southbankcentre.co.uk/sites/default/files/press_releases/Barenboim_Artist_As_Leader_PR.pdf 3 http://www.a-n.co.uk/tag/artist-as-leader

John Holden (2002) which brought the term ‘cultural leadership’ into the public policy arena. The Clore programme continues, with its flagship Fellowships currently delivered during an intensive seven month period annually, while a range of shorter courses and alumni opportunities are also offered.4 In the meantime other cultural leadership initiatives have come along and some of them have gone. Notably, the Cultural Leadership Programme (CLP) was funded directly by the UK government and administered by Arts Council England (ACE) between 2006-2011, while the British Council ran Cultural Leadership International (CLI) between 2008-11, initially as the international strand of the CLP on ACE’s behalf (Rossello 2014: 1).5 Research for the Clore Leadership Programme identifies another 195 leadership courses in England alone, run by business schools, universities, private providers and professional bodies, of which about 60 are particular to the cultural sector, although most of these are targeted at subsectors such as theatre, libraries or music (TBR 2013: 12). Several more programmes using the language of cultural leadership have developed internationally. These include the Advanced Cultural Leadership Programme at the University of Hong Kong, on which the Clore Leadership Programme is an advisory partner (operating since 2011); the Utrecht-based Leadership in the Cultural Sector course, supported by the Dutch government (since 2013); the African Cultural Leadership Programme, implemented by Cape Town’s African Arts Institute and supported by the European Union and the Goethe Institute (2012-14); and a developing European Cultural Leadership programme, co-ordinated by Gothenburg’s Nätverkstan with partners Trans Europe Halles, Olivearte Cultural Agency and ENCATC, the European network on cultural management and policy. 6

Just as this proliferation of interest and opportunity in cultural leadership was developing, the global financial crisis brought major changes to the political and economic contexts in which the cultural sector was operating in the UK and internationally. A year after the Artist as Leader report was published, the UK had a new coalition government talking the language of austerity, while a DCMS Select Committee heard cultural leadership described as ‘hubris’, with its investment seen as

4 http://www.cloreleadership.org/programmes.aspx 5 An outline of the CLP and its history is available at: http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/artscouncil-initiatives/past-initiatives/the-cultural-leadership-programme/ 6 Advanced Cultural Leadership Programme, Hong Kong: http://www.culture.hku.hk/; Leadership in the Cultural Sector, Netherlands: http://leiderschapincultuur.nl/english/; African Cultural Leadership Programme: http://www.afai.org.za/training-central-africa-update/#; European Cultural Leadership: http://europeanculturalleadership.org/

2 feeding luxurious growth in middle management posts in the face of imminent sectoral redundancies (Gordon & Stark 2010: 3.b.ii.5.). The CLP was mothballed within months and the CLI followed suit. The first, expansive, phase of cultural leadership development was over; however, this marked a change in tone rather than the death of the discourse. By 2012, Arts Council England was seeking to invest in ‘resilient’ leadership for culture in a smaller initiative subsequently picked up by Clore (Arts Council England 2012), while Clore’s international conversations, begun with Hong Kong back in 2008, were starting to bear fruit (Hoyle 2014b:13).

This research therefore began at a point when cultural leadership as a concern and priority within cultural policy and training was about a decade old and in the midst of transition. Whatever issues faced the UK cultural sector in 2002, its challenges had by now changed and, in many ways, intensified. Austerity discourse and government cutbacks meant that cultural leadership could no longer be taken as read as a ‘good’ or even necessary concept despite its established status at home and influence abroad. Much the same could be said for the public cultural funding system, which also entered a new era, particularly in the UK, where it faced fundamental challenges to its legitimacy and investigation of its values during the period of this research (Stark, Gordon & Powell 2013; 2014a; 2014b; 2015; Warwick Commission 2015). The sector’s leadership needs in coping with these shifting circumstances have also been subject to review (TBR 2013). Meanwhile the developing international engagement with cultural leadership means that new perspectives on the concept are now emerging in relation to different cultural contexts (Caust 2015). It is timely, then, to revisit the possible definitions of cultural leadership, the assumptions behind it, and the possible applications of the concept in contemporary cultural development. It also makes sense to examine its relationship to rather longer term tendencies and trajectories in cultural policy which risk being obscured by the slings and arrows of an embattled sector’s immediate fortune.

1.2. Questions, scope and assumptions

1.2.1. Cultural leadership as discourse

Cultural leadership, as articulated in UK policy and practice since 2002, has not until now been approached or analysed as a distinct discursive formation, or ‘order of discourse’ (Jørgensen & Phillips 2002: 56). Writing published specifically on the topic has been mainly exploratory, establishing and populating the field rather than critiquing it. Problems relating to cultural leadership have been identified (Hewison 2004; Jennings & Jones 2010; Williams 2010; TBR 2013), techniques and solutions proposed (Ladkin 2010; Norbury 2010; Holden & Hewison 2012) and initiatives established (Holden & Hewison 2002; Arts Council England 2006; 2013; British Council 2014). The topic is empirically founded (Venner 2010) as an area of professional challenge and practical response. It is embodied both in the training programmes that have emerged under its general heading and in their expanding network of alumni. The present research attempts to extend the scope of existing literature by understanding how this field of action has been formed and what values it incorporates, rather than by trying to contribute new techniques or efficiencies. It is a critical enquiry as opposed to a scientific or instrumental project (Wodak & Meyer 2001: 13 n7). However, it also stems from a personal commitment to cultural development, in particular to the vital role of the arts as media of expressive meaning in individual and collective life, and my own interests inevitably shape its trajectory.

1.2.2. A personal perspective

The original brief defined by Gray’s has naturally been filtered through my own interests in the subject. Prior to this studentship I had been working in local authority cultural development for over 14 years, including almost the entire period of the New Labour government, witnessing the advent of various interventions in cultural and public policy and the emergence of new forms of language to describe them. In many cases I was involved in trying to interpret and implement these initiatives at a local or sometimes regional level. More recently I had been involved in grant assessment processes for the European Commission’s Culture Programme (now part of Creative

Europe). From a public service perspective I was interested in how people working together with pooled resources can get substantial creative ideas off the ground which couldn’t otherwise have happened. For me, the role of the public sector in culture was to create the circumstances in which such things could happen and to ensure meaningful public involvement. I had therefore become interested in the operation of cultural policy, particularly as it related to the arts, including the uses, ethics and effectiveness of public subsidy. Having also worked independently I was aware that there is a lot more to the cultural sector than its subsidised elements, but these areas open up particularly interesting questions. The interactions of the public, the public sector and the cultural sector produce challenging arguments about the definitions, values, ownership and purpose of the arts. It seemed to me that one role of anyone considered a ‘cultural leader’ is to engage with and contribute to such issues. No doubt my assumptions and interests were also shaped by an academic background in cultural studies which foregrounds contextual and political questions of this sort. For these reasons the research sets out with a focus on discovering how cultural leadership is constructed and defined rather than ‘how to do it better’. It does so not with a disregard for the importance of better cultural leadership but rather with a concern to first be clear about what ‘better’ might actually mean for such a concept.

1.2.3. Questioning cultural leadership

Specific questions that the research attempts to address begin with what cultural leadership is, how it has come to be defined and by whom. Who can be a ‘cultural leader’? In what type of scenario is ‘cultural leadership’ practiced? This has involved working with policy documents and the relatively small body of writing directly on cultural leadership, as well as other work on arts and cultural administration and the wider management and leadership literature. The core of the research is a programme of research interviews with selected cultural and public sector professionals offering a complementary range of perspectives on these issues. Within the interviews these questions were approached through interviewees’ conceptual understandings of cultural leadership and through exploration of their actual professional roles. Other areas similarly approached include ideas of resilience, quality and value, with the aim

5 of understanding how such principles are experienced and interpreted in practice by cultural leaders, beyond their use in rhetoric.

The enquiry moves on to ask about the relationship between cultural leadership and cultural policy. This opens up questions of how cultural leadership extends outside cultural organisations and beyond the cultural sector, including its interactions with government and the public. The ways in which cultural leadership has changed over time is considered in terms of political, economic and international agendas. The Artist as Leader research becomes relevant here in suggesting a framework through which these movements and relationships can be mapped and understood (Douglas & Fremantle 2009). This framework is further informed by the perspectives and experience of the interviewees.

Overall these enquiries seek to establish how the ways in which cultural leadership is understood and imagined may be limited by the conditions through which its discourse has developed. The research finally seeks to return to the developmental agenda of cultural leadership to ask in what ways it remains an important or useful concept, and what implications the issues raised may have for cultural practitioners, organisational leaders, policy makers and training providers.

1.3. Thesis chapter outlines

1.3.1. Chapter 2: Method and theory

Chapter 2 sets out the methodology applied to this enquiry and introduces its theoretical basis. It begins with an overview of the approach to cultural leadership as discourse (2.1), establishing a working definition of discourse as applied in this research before establishing the principles of analysis with some key definitions (2.2). In particular, the concept of discourse being applied is outlined with reference to Foucault’s (1981; 2002) critical theory and analytical applications by Wodak and Meyer (2001), Jørgensen and Phillips (2002) and Gee (2005). Meanwhile a key concept of political philosophy which informs the analysis, Hannah Arendt’s theory of action as

6 developed in The Human Condition (Arendt 1998), is introduced in terms of its relation to the idea of leadership.

The chapter goes on (2.3) to describe the rationale behind the selection of the 19 interviewees for the research and explains the different perspectives that each are considered to bring to the topic. These are set out in terms of the range of cultural forms represented; the relationship of each to cultural funding mechanisms; their levels of responsibility within cultural organisations; the experiences of some as artists; strategic or political experience; national or international perspectives; potential insight into cultural leadership development. My own relationships with each interviewee are acknowledged and some cross over with the Artist as Leader work is explained. The interview process and the interrelationships of the texts are positioned within an overall approach of ‘reflexive pragmatism’, an interpretive approach which treats data sceptically and attempts to engage with the ‘richness of meaning in complex empirical material’ (Alvesson 2003: 14).

There is also a brief outline of the approach to using literature (2.4) as part of the research technique, rather than merely as background to the enquiry. This is the reason why the chapter on methodology precedes the literature analysis. The relevant literature is roughly categorised in terms of policy documents, histories, critical and cultural theory and methodological material. The approach that will be applied in the analytical chapters to generating dialogue between the literature and the interviews is described.

The chapter finishes by recognising the influence of various events, discussions and networks which have influenced the research, its direction and its methodology during the course of the Ph.D. process (2.5). This includes the relevance of my own prior experience and background to research decisions.

1.3.2. Chapter 3: Literature review and analysis

This chapter sets out to take stock of existing literature relevant to the research and to identify useful thematic relationships between texts of different origin. It begins with a

7 typology of the different kinds of work cited (3.1), establishing the range of sources relevant to an understanding of cultural leadership and the different perspectives and interests represented by each. With no single narrative account of recent cultural leadership development available, a ‘short history’ of the term is constructed (3.2) which goes back to the origins of cultural administration training in the UK and internationally (Pick 1980, Moody 2002; Gordon & Stark 2010; ENCATC 2015). An earlier, American, use of the term is also considered suggesting a possible understanding of cultural leadership as a role shaping the circumstances of cultural production, reception and development which is not necessarily limited to cultural sector professionals (Corn 1998). The establishment of cultural leadership discourse in UK training is traced (3.3) through developments in policy and training (Resource 2001; Hewison & Holden 2002; Hewison 2004; Kay 2010; Arts Council England 2012, Creative Scotland 2013; TBR 2013). An expansion of interest in cultural and artistic leadership in government and business circles follows nationally and internationally (3.4), but is shaped primarily by organisational and economic concerns at the expense of artistic, social or cultural content (Adler 2006; Hewison 2006, 2014; Holden 2007; National Endowment for the Arts 2008; Douglas & Fremantle 2009).

The relationship of cultural leadership to other areas of cultural policy is examined, including historical term patterns of public intervention in the arts, the rise of cultural and creative industries agendas and the values and power structures at play in structuring and resourcing contemporary public culture (3.5). Longer term histories (Hewison 1995, Sinclair 1995, Hesmondhalgh 2007; Belfiore & Bennett 2008) are consulted alongside accounts of more recent developments (Knell & Taylor 2011; Hewison 2014; Bell & Oakley 2015). It is argued that the values shaping cultural policy are themselves matters of cultural leadership but that the pattern of discourse has minimised the extent to which ethical questions are addressed within it. The intensification of these questions since the financial crisis is related to the rise of participatory and socially engaged practices (Jackson 2011; Mesch 2013). These are seen to challenge the exclusion of aesthetic and social concerns from organisational development and to highlight issues of democratic legitimacy in cultural policy (Holden 2006). There is also consideration (3.6) of how some theories and concepts from business leadership have been related more or less usefully to the challenges of the cultural sector, including transactional, transformational and relational models (Bass 1990; Hewison 2004, 2006; Marturano & Gosling 2008; Kay & Venner 2010). Some

8 critique of the construction of leadership is considered, including Alvesson and Spicer’s (2011) work on the role of metaphor and Grint’s (2005) division of leadership into people, position, result and process. Finally (3.7), the contemporary challenges of cultural leadership as revealed through the available literature are assessed with particular reference to an emergent discourse of ‘resilience’ (Arts Council England 2012; Creative Scotland 2013) as well as Clore’s most recent statistical research into cultural leadership (TBR 2013). It is concluded that changing economic and political circumstances have altered the relationship between cultural leadership and public subsidy and that the concept should now be defined by questions of value at least as much as questions of competence.

1.3.3. Chapter 4: The experience of cultural leadership: interview analysis

The programme of interviews is the core of the research and their analysis is central to the thesis. Consequently this is the longest chapter, seeking to interweave the voices and perspectives of the different interviewees. It does not analyse individual interviews sequentially but instead works through various themes arising from the research to draw out cross-discursive connections and contradictions. It seeks to identify relationships between the perspectives of the interviewees and with the literature to compare the discourse of cultural leadership to the way it is experienced. After introducing this approach (4.1), the chapter explores interviewees’ understandings of leadership in general and their working definitions of cultural leadership in particular (4.2). Some difficulties of identifying with the idea of being an individual ‘leader’ are discussed, while a commonly expressed need to be able to relate work effectively with and through others is related to Arendt’s conception of ‘boundless’ action (outlined in section 2.2), challenging the limitations of understanding cultural leadership as a remit limited to the cultural sector.

Another theme is the role of language in shaping expectations and expressing values for leaders within the cultural sector (4.3). Experiences from different places in the cultural system are highlighted, from Janet Archer’s inheritance of a post-crisis Creative Scotland to Dawn Fuller and Emma Tregidden’s search for appropriate language to communicate their co-creative participatory practice in Leeds. The

9 relationships of different interviewees to ‘creative industries’ discourse demonstrate not only its pervasiveness but also the gap that can exist between rhetoric and action. The values revealed in the sector’s relationship to the language of resilience are also explored. Further questions of value are pursued in relation to the idea of ‘quality’ (4.4). Interviewees negotiate tensions between ‘quality of experience’ in cultural delivery and discourses of ‘excellence’ or high art. The value of trust as an essential component of the necessary relationships through which these and other tensions can be worked out emerges strongly. It appears as equally valuable in public funding relationships (Archer; Cluny Macpherson), private sector partnerships (Andrew Ormston), community development (Fuller and Tregidden), and, indeed, within cultural leadership training (Sue Hoyle).

Interviewees’ interactions with policy and politics are explored at length (4.5), opening up the relationship between the cultural sector, government and the public. The agendas of funders are discussed, including the impact of managerialism and the relationship of policy to evidence, demonstrating the impossibility of talking about such topics without revisiting questions of value and the social role of the cultural sector (Ormston; François Matarasso). Meanwhile, the importance of generating international connections and perspectives on their work is of growing importance for a number of interviewees (4.6). Not only do such connections offer new possibilities for professional work and encourage leaders to look beyond existing models of work, they appear as creatively essential in terms of remaining current amidst increasingly globalised cultural forms (Archer; Hoyle; Sharon Watson). The evolving approach of the British Council is explored through internal and external perspectives, suggesting that changes of value taking place at this level also impact the skills demanded of cultural leaders (Ferdinand Richard; Pablo Rossello).

The place of the artist within cultural leadership develops for some interviewees as a further connection point between art and politics (4.7). While directly aesthetic concerns are little discussed, the impact on practice of political contexts is frequently a matter of concern, illustrating the necessity for political self-awareness as part of taking ethical responsibility for creative work (Matarasso; Ormston; James Marriott; Julie Ward). Social practice can even be seen to redefine the concept of beauty in political terms (Roanne Dods; Suzy Glass). The example of Phoenix Dance Theatre is examined as a place where aesthetics, community identity and social politics are

10 drawn together within an individual artistic leadership role (Watson). This leads on to consideration of leadership within cultural organisations (4.8), which includes exploring the extent to which cultural leadership is considered to be specifically tied to organisational development (Hoyle), but also the extent to which preserving established structures can become an impediment to the achievement of creative goals (Dods, Glass, Chris Fremantle).

The nature of exchange between culture and the public sphere is then further developed (4.9) in terms of how interviewees experience social change in relation to their work. The decentred position of the artist in emergent social practice is seen to parallel the changing role of leaders in post-heroic models of practice. However, some interviewees experience a gap between the demand for more democratic versions of cultural provision and the capacity of existing systems and institutions to work effectively in this way (James Brining; Matarasso; Richard). These observations are related to current theory around cultural engagement (Hope 2011; Jancovich 2011). In the final section of the chapter, interviewees’ provide their viewpoints on cultural leadership training in terms of their experiences and their perceptions of need (4.10). These include reflections from course providers (Hoyle, Rossello) as well as participants (Ward, Watson), with particular emphasis on the Clore programme. Their descriptions are related to the earlier diagnoses of cultural sector leadership as an area of need (Hewison 2004, 2006). They tend to reinforce the sense that the development of relational leadership styles is most appropriate for the cultural sector, but it seems that some expectations and habits of speech remain conditioned by more traditional models. The need to be able to work as a cultural leader amongst the inherent contradictions of the concept is recognised. Finally, there is acknowledgement of some underexplored questions about the relative accessibility of existing cultural leadership training.

1.3.4. Chapter 5: Spheres of cultural leadership

Building on some themes emerging from the interviews and literature, Chapter 5 begins by reflecting on the relationship of leadership to authority (5.1) and the critical function of art in modern society. Within a modern democratic system, both art and

11 leadership appear as ‘post-fundamental’ concepts (Gielen & Lijster 2015), required to continually critique and remake the authority through which they claim to operate. It is argued that art is necessarily related to social value systems and that its meanings are defined by this contingency. Art has a role in challenging the cultural standards which are themselves used to judge its value through established mechanisms such as the public funding system. As a form of cultural leadership it is therefore a medium for the articulation of possible change, but, in keeping with Arendt’s (1998) theory of action, it depends on external responses in the social and political realms to complete its meaning.

The relationship between culture, government in the public is then further explored, firstly by expanding on the issue of trust as a key element in the various relationships underpinning the cultural system (5.2). This is illustrated through an example from my own experience as a local authority arts manager in Leeds as well as through further reference to the 2012 crisis at Creative Scotland. An outline of the dynamic relationship between the cultural sector, civic authorities and the public is discussed and related to similar formulations (Holden 2006; Gielen & Lijster 2015). This leads to identification of a societal dimension of cultural leadership corresponding to the ‘public sphere’ of the Artist as Leader analysis (Douglas & Fremantle 2009). A framework for cultural leadership is developed to build on this further (5.3), setting out the spheres of action and influence in which artists, cultural sector leaders, cultural organisations, policy makers and societal actors participate and overlap. The process of cultural leadership is seen to be constructed discursively within this model, taking place at various times in any part of it. The arguments of this chapter are summarised (5.4) with an emphasis on the need for cultural sector actors to develop self-awareness and an understanding of these relationships if they are to work effectively among them.

1.3.5. Chapter 6: Conclusions

In attempting to draw together the threads of the research the final chapter returns to some of the original motivating questions, including those of who can be a cultural leader and where cultural leadership takes place. It argues that a contemporary understanding of cultural leadership should go beyond the attributes and practices of

12 individual leaders in the cultural sector to take into account the artistic, organisational and social systems of influence through which forms of cultural and creative expression are developed. Cultural leadership has been shaped by policy and training discourse as a function of cultural sector professionals with organisational responsibilities, but this formulation is seen to limit understanding of how cultural activity is produced to the actions of the sector itself while serving to reinforce existing institutional structures. A wider understanding of cultural leadership as a process taking place equally in public and political spheres generates a challenge for artists and other cultural sector leaders to work across disciplinary and social boundaries, becoming influential by themselves embracing wider forms of influence. In this way leadership can be reintegrated within a larger conception of action, forgoing the pretence of control but gaining the capacity to respond adaptively to the essential unpredictability of the external world.

These connections are seen to shed additional light on the relationship between cultural leadership and cultural policy. Both are seen to have a role to play in arguing for the primacy of particular values, including making the case for whether or not culture is worth investing in from the public purse and defining what exactly its institutions are expected to deliver in return. Engagement with questions of social value is therefore demanded of the cultural policy process and sectoral cultural leadership alike if each is to maintain its legitimacy in a democratic system. Cultural leadership must inevitably mean something different outside the conditions of democracy, and this should add to the care with which the term is used as its currency increases in different political contexts in various parts of the world.

Part of the contribution made by this research is to approach ‘cultural leadership’ as a discursive formation in the first place. The purpose of this is not merely to understand its origins as a concept but also to enable understanding of its processes in the interests of more effective cultural sector engagement with the social and political spheres. As Jørgensen and Phillips (2002: 178) have asserted, ‘the constituted social world provides conditions of possibility for action’. The framework for analysis developed in Chapter 5 therefore tries to articulate the constitution of cultural leadership. The research is therefore seen as having relevance for cultural practitioners and policy makers as well as those developing dedicated training for cultural sector leaders.

The thesis concludes by observing that cultural leadership first emerged as a concept in policy discourse in response to the perception of a crisis. This was perhaps neither more nor less than a cultural sector exhibition of societal concern with leadership: as Alvesson and Spicer (2011: 1) have put it, ‘whatever the problem, leadership has become the solution’. At the end of 2015 it can be argued that there is still a crisis of cultural leadership, but that the crisis now is at the level of the destabilisation of the welfare capitalism model of state subsidy (Bell & Oakley 2015: 6-7) and, specifically, the expression of political antipathy to cultural funding in an increasing number of countries (Gielen & Lijster 2015: 44). These overarching political and economic issues impact on cultural practitioners in the challenges of resourcing their work, finding the right structures for their organisations, establishing appropriate relationships and devoting adequate time and energy to creative development. It makes little sense to argue that cultural leadership is the ‘solution’ to such issues but it does make sense for cultural actors at all levels to become literate in the leadership processes which create the conditions in which they work.

1.4. A note on definitions: culture, art and creativity

Writing on cultural leadership, cultural policy and the arts makes rubbing up against some awkward questions of definition unavoidable. Raymond Williams (1976: 76) famously called culture ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ and the four intervening decades have done little to simplify things. Writing on culture has a tendency to slide between two of the most common definitions of the word. In the Oxford English Dictionary these are numbers 6: ‘Refinement of mind, taste, and manners; artistic and intellectual development. Hence: the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively’; and 7a: ‘The distinctive ideas, customs, social behaviour, products, or way of life of a particular nation, society, people, or period. Hence: a society or group characterized by such customs, etc.’. The first of these – the ‘refinement’ definition – encapsulates the arts but somehow goes beyond them. The second – the anthropological definition – potentially includes a great range of creative or expressive activities, as well as many other attitudes, habits and behaviours. The two senses are not mutually exclusive – it would perhaps be easier if they were. The arts are products and practices in

14 themselves, and also part of what people do. It is not always clear if references to ‘culture’ are intended to be inclusive (anthropological) or exclusive (refined). Definitions of ‘the arts’, in any case, are similarly diverse and slippery, often related problematically to ‘creativity’, an attribute which can be claimed with equal legitimacy by numerous non-artistic fields of activity. In policy discourse the variety of possible connotations has given rise to terms such as cultural industries, creative industries and creative economy, the development of which is traced more fully in the literature review below (section 3.4.1).

In UK policy cultural leadership is originally conceived as something to be developed across the arts, museums and libraries, in contrast to training provision targeted exclusively at any one of those fields. For the Clore Duffield Foundation, the cultural sector was ‘loosely defined as including museums, galleries, heritage organisations, performing arts organisations, libraries and archives’ (Hewison & Holden 2002). Essentially this matches the typical organisation of cultural services in the public sector, covering the fields overseen at that time in England by Arts Council England and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA).7 This definition has since broadened out, with the Clore Leadership Programme now aimed at the creative industries, film, digital media and cultural policy as well as arts, museums and libraries.8 This more closely reflects the cultural remit of the DCMS. However, the overlaps, inconsistencies and contrasts between the various public cultural agencies in the UK alone indicate the impossibility of using any one term consistently to mean the same thing to all people.

Within this thesis I generally use the term ‘cultural sector’ to indicate the wide range of cultural actors included in the current Clore definition above. Sometimes (and I hope it is clear from context) the reference will be specifically to those parts of this sector in receipt of public funding. ‘Culture’ is used to indicate the activity produced by this wide cultural sector (a version of the ‘refinement’ definition) and it is also used in its anthropological sense. Again, context should clarify and I have tried to be explicit where it seems necessary. ‘The arts’ always indicates the full range of performing and visual arts, including digital art and new media as well as folk art, community arts and

7 Notably, ACE’s ten year strategy, Great Art for Everyone, originally published in 2010, was reissued as Great Art and Culture for Everyone (Arts Council England 2013) following its absorption of libraries and heritage duties from the abolished MLA in 2011. 8 http://www.cloreleadership.org/programmes.aspx

15 social practice. ‘Cultural policy’ usually refers to the forms of legal and financial intervention developed by public authorities and their agencies to more or less directly support, shape, exploit or limit cultural development. However, it is recognised that private and voluntary sector organisations also establish policies, generally as frameworks for their own action but sometimes with profound significance for the wider sector, particularly in areas where government itself is not particularly active or influential. The Clore Duffield Foundation’s intervention in cultural leadership is a case in point, as Gordon and Stark have noted (2010: 3.b.ii.2).

When referring specifically to artist-leaders and non-artist leaders of cultural sector organisations I have tried to use the term ‘cultural sector leaders’ rather than the more ambiguous ‘cultural leaders’, which within this research indicates anyone who may have influence on culture whether their professional role is internal or external to the sector. I would argue that these vagaries are part of the reason why there is no single coherent area of practice to which ‘cultural leadership’ can be consistently assumed to refer, even within the relatively limited framework of UK cultural policy. This makes it likely at the outset that the term will be inconsistently applied in the policy arena, depending for its definition on context, expectation and habits of thought. The possible, multiple meanings of cultural leadership lie at the heart of this enquiry.

Chapter 2: Method and theory

2.1. Overview

A key feature of this research is to explore the concept of cultural leadership by approaching and analysing it as a field of discourse. This leads to questioning the assumptions, values and power relationships relevant to its spheres of operation, and attempts to move understanding of the topic beyond consideration of techniques or the relative effectiveness of particular leadership models. Cultural leadership is not viewed as a single, unified discourse but as a complex interaction of influence and action conducted by players positioned both within and outside of exclusively ‘cultural sector’ roles.

The methodological approach begins by outlining what is meant by discourse in this context and how discourse analysis is applied as a critical tool in the research. The research itself is based on a programme of interviews intended to provide conceptual and practical insights complementary to the relevant literature. The basis of interviewee selection is discussed in relation to the research method. Critical discourse analysis then provides the main interpretive basis for working with each type of text, revealing the elements which make up the discourse of cultural leadership. Additional influences on the direction and interpretation of the research are acknowledged at the end of the chapter.

2.2. Theoretical framework: principles of analysis

2.2.1. Understanding cultural leadership as a discursive construction

My working definition of ‘discourse’ as applied in this research is drawn in part from the ideas of Michel Foucault as well as from more recent discourse theorists including Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer (2001), Marianne Jørgensen and Louise Phillips (2002), James Paul Gee (2005) and Norman Fairclough (2013). Discourse is

17 understood as the pattern of speech and text used to describe a subject which is itself constitutive of that subject. It is the linguistic framework within which possible utterances occur. Certain ways of speaking and writing become accepted and expected, generating implicit rules and legitimating particular ways of thinking. More than just a way of talking, discourse is therefore ‘a form of social action that plays a part in producing the social world’ (Jørgensen & Phillips 2002: 5). Propositions which do not conform to the dominant discourse - which are not ‘in the true’ - risk being ignored or ridiculed, as Foucault observes of certain historic scientific and medical advances which were originally scorned by contemporaries (Foucault 1981: 60-1). Other ways of thinking are crowded out, whether deliberately or unconsciously: ‘instances of discursive production … also administer silences’ (Foucault 1990: 12). Unspoken rules are hard to challenge; by going unchallenged they are reinforced. In this sense a discourse is defined by what is simultaneously ‘always said’ and ‘never said’ (Foucault 2002: 27).

One purpose of discourse analysis is to identify the unstated rules which have been both constructed and adhered to by contributors to a discursive field. It scatters dust over the invisible discourses which surround a subject, revealing their individual shape and points of intersection. This includes unchallenged assumptions, de facto boundaries, and the values privileged within each discourse. Through such analysis the interests being served or suppressed by the current state of affairs can be clarified.

Jørgensen and Phillips (2002: 56) use the additional concept of the ‘order of discourse’ to denote ‘a social space in which different discourses partly cover the same terrain which they compete to fill with meaning’. The order of discourse includes all discourses in current use in a particular field, but not all possible discourses (ibid. 72). Importantly, orders of discourse are ‘open to change when discourses and genres from other orders of discourse are brought into play’ (ibid., original emphasis). Elements from one discourse can be become re-contextualised in another with the potential for generating new forms of meaning. The order of discourse relating to cultural leadership could be said to include (at a minimum) the discourses of business leadership, arts administration, public sector management and professional training. One function of the research is to bring this order of discourse into contact with that of the Artist as Leader, with which it can be seen to overlap, particularly in the area of organisational leadership, but from which the additional genres of aesthetic and social

18 leadership are introduced. The potential for change generated by this encounter is part of the intended contribution of this research.

I have claimed in the introductory chapter (1.2.1) that cultural leadership has not previously been analysed as a discursive formation. This is not to say that previous writing on the subject has failed to recognise some of its constituent discursive constructions, including that of leadership itself. Several writers on cultural leadership take a critical view of business leadership discourse in particular (Hewison 2004; Burns & Wilson 2010; Langley 2010) as well as of the cultural sector’s structures and attitudes (Hewison & Holden 2002; Leicester 2010; Williams 2010; Sofaer 2012). The discrete concept of cultural leadership, however, appears in many of these texts as freshly minted, an area of potential, defined as a problem only to become a site for solutions. Its issues are its lack of previous identification and development, not its conceptual limitations or its exclusions. It is probably only in the last three or four years that identification and analysis of the discourse of cultural leadership has become possible because only recently has there been enough material from which to gauge its shape. As Foucault points out, there is a connection between ‘multiplicity’ and discursive limitation: the ‘resources for the creation of discourses … are nonetheless principles of constraint’ (Foucault 1981: 61). In other words, cultural leadership needed to be used as a concept and build up a history of discursive events before there was anything that could be analysed. It is only through such patterns of use - through their tacit or deliberate inclusions and exclusions - that a discipline emerges over time. Like deciphering an unknown language, analysis requires not only the basic symbols but also instances of meaningful application. Meanwhile, the steady extension of cultural leadership into new international contexts will inevitably develop new orders of discourse through which the concept will be reconstructed in relation to each unique set of cultural conditions. This diversification makes it all the more urgent to identify the features of cultural leadership discourse as currently established to make it possible to track and understand these further changes as they emerge.

2.2.2. Discourse analysis as interpretive perspective

Central to my approach is the application of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a means of relating and understanding the various texts and perspectives encountered during the research. These include the different areas of literature (historical, critical and policy-related) as well as interview texts and other expressions of personal or institutional opinion emerging through talks, events, press articles and web pages. The principles of my method derive in large part from Wodak and Meyer’s (2001) account of CDA and are further influenced by the practical and theoretical contributions of Gee (2005) and Jørgensen and Phillips (2002).

Wodak and Meyer make an important primary distinction between the basic intentions of scientific and critical theories (Wodak & Meyer 2001: 13, note 7). Where scientific approaches are ‘objectifying’, in the sense that the theory is not part of the object domain, and aims towards instrumental use of the knowledge for certain effects, critical theory is characteristically ‘reflective’, always itself part of the domain that it tries to describe, recognising that discourses are historical and dependent for their meaning on context. As Wodak and Meyer put it: ‘critical theories aim at making ‘agents’ aware of hidden coercion, thereby freeing them from that coercion and putting them in a position to determine where their true interests lie’ (ibid.). Intertextuality and interdiscursivity - the relationships between texts - are therefore key areas for exploration in what is essentially a political project and ‘endeavours to make explicit power relationships which are frequently hidden’ (ibid. 15). This points to the relevance of this form of analysis for understanding a discourse which is at least partly formed by organisations shaping or implementing public policy. Gee has observed how intertextuality can work by incorporating within a text the perspective of other texts not through direct quotation but by oblique referencing or allusion (Gee 2005: 46-8). This lends authority to the main voice whilst also reinforcing a background position that doesn’t itself have to be explicitly stated. Gee points out that this is ‘typical of public policy documents’, in which research ‘tends to speak with one voice and a voice that supports the policy in the policy document’ (ibid. 48).

One of the areas of interest within my research is to explore the relationship between policy and cultural practice. The theoretical intentions and grand designs of political objectives are notoriously fraught with local implementation difficulties and the laws of

20 unintended consequences.9 Most of the research interviewees are engaged on a daily basis with different levels of this imprecise translation process; in a sense, this is the stuff of ‘cultural leadership’, as they negotiate their artistic, organisational and public roles in relation to shifting external influences. Wodak and Meyer point out that linking the ‘top down’ with the ‘bottom up’ is a feature of CDA, as local situations are related to societal structures (Wodak & Meyer 2001: 117-8). This is among the reasons why it stands out as an approach relevant and appropriate to this research.

CDA is as much a critical perspective as a method (ibid. 96-7). It is a set of principles rather than of techniques; the use of a particular theoretical base and approach to analysis rather than a method for generating information. As Wodak and Meyer emphasise, ‘there is no typical CDA way of collecting data’ (ibid. 23-4). It is instead a triangulation process between texts, and between texts and their contexts. A relational reading of texts reveals their collective symbolism, the stereotypes (or ‘topoi’) through which discourses are linked (ibid. 29-35). Symbolic archetypes such as ‘leader’, ‘artist’ or even ‘policy maker’ can be seen to play this kind of connecting role, appearing as they do in diverse categories of text. However, the values attached to each can vary according to context, and I suggest that where such differences can be identified, separate discourses are in operation. Hence my assertion that there is no single discourse of cultural leadership, but multiple strands within cultural leadership’s overall ‘order of discourse’.

Despite their wariness about defining CDA as a research technique, Wodak and Meyer nonetheless offer a basic toolbox for its use in analysis. This is a five point method which involves firstly characterising the sector (and therefore identifying the overall ‘discourse plane’); establishing the material base (texts or research data); conducting a structural analysis to evaluate the material; conducting fine analysis of a ‘typical’ or exemplary fragment; proceeding to overall analysis, leading to reflection on the sector. These stages are roughly paralleled in this research by defining the overall field of cultural leadership (chapters 1, 3 & 4); assembling the interview texts and literary base (chapter 3; appendices); subsequent reviews and analysis (relating individual professional experience to broader political, historical and philosophical themes: chapters 4-5); conclusions and reflections (chapter 6).

9 See Sieber 1981 for a detailed and fascinating analytical breakdown of counter-productivity and patterns of ‘regressive’ (exactly opposite to intended, rather than simply failed) effects in social policy interventions.

2.2.3. Arendt’s theory of action

Hannah Arendt’s theory of action is used in this research to identify a deep rooted ethical problem with the dominant conceptions of leadership in contemporary business discourse. It suggests an alternative way of relating leadership to action which offers a useful basis for rethinking cultural leadership in particular.

In The Human Condition, Arendt identifies two constituent elements of the concept of action by examining their origins in classical languages. She observes how two verbs could originally be used to express action in both Greek and Latin, with one carrying the particular sense ‘to begin’ or ‘set in motion’ and ‘lead’ (archein in Greek and agere in Latin) and the other meaning ‘to achieve’, ‘finish’, or ‘bear’ (prattein and gerere) (Arendt 1998: 189). These different senses highlight ‘the dependency of the beginner and leader upon others to help’ as well as the reciprocal dependence of followers on the leader for ‘an occasion to act themselves’ (ibid.). Each actor ‘moves among and in relation to other acting beings’ (ibid. 190) and so is affected by the actions of others: ‘To do and to suffer are like opposite sides of the same coin, and the story that an act starts is composed of its consequent deeds and sufferings’ (ibid.).

Arendt distils three linked characteristics from this: firstly, the ‘boundlessness’ of action and reaction, which ‘never move in a closed circle, and can never be reliably confined to two partners’ (ibid.); secondly, action’s ‘plurality’ – the dependence on multiple people for the realisation of an act, which is itself the basis of political life (ibid. 7); and finally its ‘inherent unpredictability’ (ibid. 191). This unpredictability is not merely the difficulty of anticipating all logical consequences of a single act, but also the impossibility of understanding the meaning of action until long after its full completion when revealed to ‘the backward glance of the historian’ (ibid. 192).

An understanding of action was originally (in Greek culture) based on the interdependence of its two elements, but in each language the archein/agere verb gradually became specialised as meaning ‘to lead’ in the sense of ‘to rule’, whereas prattein/gerere became the single general term for action (ibid. 189). The initiating actor therefore became the ruler, isolated by their authority from others whose role was merely to follow commands (ibid.). The leader thus becomes imbued with an illusory sense of strength, masking any sense of dependence on others, and from this arises

‘the fallacy of the strong man who is powerful because he is alone’ (ibid. 190). Arendt shows how this idea was developed by Plato, who considered the need for the beginner to be helped by others as a weakness (ibid. 222-3). The Platonic ideal of ‘mastership’ overcomes this problem in two ways – by minimising the free will of the follower and by insulating the leader against the dirty-handed business of work:

In the realm of action, this isolated mastership can be achieved only if the others are no longer needed to join the enterprise of their own accord, with their own motives and aims, but are used to execute orders, and if, on the other hand, the beginner who took the initiative does not permit himself to get involved in the action itself. (Arendt 1998: 222)

Beginning (or leading) and acting thus become separated as different tasks, carried out by different classes of people. In this way, ‘Plato was the first to introduce the division between those who know and do not act and those who act and do not know’ (ibid. 223). This creates the ethical problem of those who just follow orders, relating strongly to Arendt’s concern with the origins of totalitarianism.10 The Platonic separation makes it possible for ordinary actors to become distanced from the moral consequences of their action. This ‘distancing’, alongside the reduction of people to a kind of ‘technical utility’, is among the ways (identified by later post-holocaust philosophers such as Bauman) in which social space can become ‘de-moralised’ (Abbinnett 2003: 19). This is a scenario in which individual moral responses to other human beings are evaded and it is accepted that ‘the chain of functional or bureaucratic tasks which produce a particular outcome (whatever this outcome might be), should be assessed only in terms of its competence and efficiency’ (ibid.).

In business leadership discourse a common contrast between leadership and management is based on exactly this kind of distinction, as Alvesson and Spicer observe in a critique of the glamorised ‘celebration of leadership’ (2011: 11). Management, in this tradition, is the process of keeping the existing system functioning competently and efficiently. It does not question the purpose of the system. Leadership, instead, is about setting the agenda and changing any system which does

10 The Human Condition (published in 1958) was the first major work Arendt completed after The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), as her later editor Margaret Canovan points out (Arendt 1998: xi).

23 not suit its purpose. This idea of leadership therefore acquires an ethical autonomy which the limited sense of management does not possess. The contrast is played up in this discourse to make leaders more ‘dynamic, important and powerful’ (ibid. 12). The mirror implication, however, is that non-leaders are insignificant and powerless.

Alvesson and Spicer criticise the rigidity of this formulation on the basis that it relates poorly to a more ‘intertwined’ practical reality (ibid.). For them it is inadequate as theory. Arendt’s analysis of action takes issue with the same kind of distinction, but emphasises instead the ethical issue of its ‘separation of knowing and doing’ (Arendt 1998: 225). Overemphasis on leadership encourages this separation – the disintegration of action into beginning and completing, or leading and following. Too much responsibility and expectation is invested in the leader and the rest of the organisation or system is absolved of accountability. Engagement with the rest of the system is cut off: an intellectual tourniquet is applied, restricting not only the circulation of moral responsibility but also creativity and the flow of ideas. Few business scenarios would benefit from extreme applications of this model but its particular inaptness for cultural settings is self-evident.11

What I suggest is required is a use of leadership better reconciled to what Arendt calls ‘the process character of action’ - its boundlessness, unpredictability and plurality (ibid. 230). For an organisational system to avoid both the ethical and practical dangers of compartmentalised power and responsibility, its version of leadership must engage with the nature of action and the interconnectedness of beginning and achieving. In a cultural sector whose very business is the communication of ideas, meaning and values it seems particularly vital that this is recognised. This recognition can by no means be taken for granted, given the sector’s noted fascination with ‘heroic’ leaders and the power of charisma, coupled with its tendency to be driven by short term targets (Hewison 2004: 163). The application of Arendt’s theory of action throughout this thesis therefore aims to safeguard against using conceptions of leadership which are inconsistent with the boundlessness, unpredictability and plurality of action, recognising in particular the essential role of relationships in the cultural sector (see 4.2.4. below) and questioning conceptions which isolate ‘leading’ from ‘doing’.

11 A reaction to such critique is evident in business literature of the last decade with models incorporating ideas of ‘humility’ (Morris et al. 2005) or reflexivity (Tourish et al. 2010), as discussed further below (3.6).

2.3. Interviews and interviewees

The core of the original research conducted for this PhD is a sequence of 18 face to face interviews involving 19 individuals. Interviewees selected for their particular perspectives on contemporary questions of cultural leadership, management and policy. The choice of interviewees was affected by a number of issues that I wanted to hold in balance. First of all, I wanted a relationship and some continuity with the Artist as Leader project, so this meant reading and listening to interviews from the research archive and identifying a handful of people to follow up. I became interested in some of the metaphors for leadership previously used by James Marriott, such as the idea of the wheel moving across a landscape (Marriott 2008: recording at 11m 00s) and the continuing relationship with artistic leadership apparent in Roanne Dods’s subsequent work. Dods was Director of the Jerwood Foundation at the time of Artist as Leader, engaged with commissioning writing on the technical, aesthetic and social complexities of the artistic production process (Tyndall 2006) and having already co-founded Missions, Models, Money (2004) as a network for thinking about culture12. At the time of the research interview she was Director at Performing Arts Labs and working on the Small is Beautiful conference, which brings together creative microbusinesses. Dods also works as a producer and has had numerous trusteeships and development roles with dance, theatre and music organisations.

Marriott is an activist and educator as well as an artist. Co-director of Platform London, which creates art projects campaigning for ecological and social justice, he is an outspoken critic of the role of oil company sponsorship in the arts, particularly at the Tate. Marriott has explored the nature of energy industry power and corruption in depth as co-author of The Oil Road (Marriott & Minio-Panuello 2012), while Platform is particularly noted for its Living Memorial to Ken Saro-Wiwa (by artist Sokari Douglas Camp, 2005), a public sculpture in the form of a ‘battle bus’, protesting the executions by the Nigerian government of Saro-Wiwa and eight fellow anti-Shell activists in 1995. As well as operating an interesting organisational model with Platform itself, Marriott’s overriding concern with the relationship of art to society, and its role in terms of public engagement, seemed to present immediate challenges to any definition of cultural leadership oriented primarily towards the institutional or economic concerns of the sector.

12 http://www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk/ (this initiative ended in 2014).

Dods and Marriott therefore became two of my earliest interviewees, alongside Chris Fremantle as co-author of the original Artist as Leader report. Fremantle, as well as being a researcher and writer on artistic leadership, has insights from experience as founder of ecoartscotland, a platform for art and ecology research and practice, and from a range of production and consultancy roles in settings including arts in health (such as developing arts strategy for New South Glasgow Hospitals) and local authority contexts (South Ayrshire Council). Meanwhile, Suzy Glass, not one of the Artist as Leader interviewees but a recommendation of Fremantle and friend of Dods, was added to this early group for her direct leadership development experience with International Creative Entrepreneurs (ICE) as well as her professional role as a producer, which seemed often to be interestingly located somewhere between artists and organisations. All four were working actively to explore and challenge definitions of leadership as applicable to the arts, and their interviews generated some immediate conceptual insights, especially in terms of thinking about the roles and limitations of arts organisations and institutions in making creative work possible.

Building on this base, there were a range of different angles I wanted the interviews to open up. I wanted to ensure that artists and the leaders of creative organisations were represented but also funders and policy makers. I also wanted input from a range of different art forms, so as not to become trapped in the discourse of any one. Not only that, but it seemed important to include professionals creating work for traditional arts venues alongside those working in community settings or other public spaces. Coming from England to work in the context of Aberdeen, I was also concerned to explore experiences from both countries as well as to obtain some perspectives from outside the UK, to reveal and potentially challenge some of the assumptions that might otherwise be made, particularly about shared terminology and perhaps about worldview. Finally, I was concerned to preserve a roughly equal gender balance within the sample and to have some variety of ethnic or cultural backgrounds. The small sample could obviously never be representative (of the nation or the sector’s workforce) but it could avoid homogeneity. Within a group of less than 20 people the only way to achieve this level of diversity was to include professionals with rich experience and multiple viewpoints. As well as the Artist as Leader network, I revisited my own existing connections in Leeds and Brussels to identify appropriate multi- dimensional individuals.

James Brining (current Artistic Director of West Yorkshire Playhouse) is a creative leader working artistically as a theatre director and organisationally as the figurehead of a major regional arts organisation. Having moved to Leeds via previous roles in Dundee and Glasgow he has experience of working and organising in both English and Scottish contexts. Moreover, as a member of the Playhouse’s Arts Development advisory group, I have been connected with Brining’s work supporting the theatre’s education and outreach programmes. Part of my interest in interviewing him stemmed from his immediate direct engagement with those initiatives as incoming director from 2012, which suggested an artistic leader giving high priority to his organisation’s community relationships.

Arnaud Pasquali, from France but working in Brussels, is Head of Sector (Culture) for the Education, Audio-visual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) of the European Commission. At the time of the interview he had very recently moved to that role from an equivalent position overseeing Media at EACEA, giving him a broader view of the creative sector. Pasquali was originally an economist and worked previously for a consultancy provided technical assistance to governments and European institutions. This gives him experience both as a funder and funding applicant at the European level. As well as the interview I also participated in workshops with Pasquali about a year later (February 2015) during a conference organised by IETM (Informal European Theatre Meeting) about cultural policy and evaluation; I also worked with his team on evaluation of applications to the agency’s Cultural Networks funding strand (2014). This and other assessment roles with EACEA strands (most recently Co-operation Projects 2013-15 and European Platforms 2014-2015) have provided additional understanding of how European policy is interpreted and implemented, so my interpretations of Pasquali’s interview and related conversations in the analysis are informed by these experiences. The same is true in relation to Barbara Gessler, who is Head of the Culture Unit at EACEA. Gessler adds another perspective from outside the UK, in her case from Germany but again working in Brussels. As Head of Unit Gessler is a full time EU civil servant (in contrast to her directly contracted team), but also fulfils a key cultural sector leadership role, with oversight of the whole Creative Europe programmes and direct management of 33 members of staff. For the interview, I was specifically interested in her relationship to policy implementation on behalf of the Commission, although Gessler also has experience at NGO level and

27 previously worked in a national development role for the German umbrella organisation of cultural organisations, the Deutscher Kulturrat.

Andrew Ormston has followed a varied career in the arts and public service including roles as Head of Culture for Birmingham City Council, for Arts Council England in London, with various European institutions as an external expert, and as an individual consultant working on projects across the cultural spectrum (he is currently based near Edinburgh). Some of the content of his interview responded to previous informal conversations that we had shared when working together for EACEA during 2012-13. Ormston offers perspectives from either side of the public funding fence as well as experience of working in different parts of the UK and in Europe.

Sharon Watson is Artistic Director for Phoenix Dance, a major national and international touring company based in Leeds. I was interested in involving Watson and Phoenix in the research for a number of reasons. Watson is a former Clore Fellow, and has undertaken the Arts Council England funded Leadership Advance course, so had already reflected at length on the definitions and practice of cultural leadership through two major programmes. She has an artist’s perspective, not only as a director and choreographer but previously as a successful dancer. Watson was among the first intake of female dancers coming into Phoenix in 1989 and became a spokesperson for the dancers (male and female) to management at that time. Now in the senior artistic and organisational role with the company she has also run her own independent dance organisation and contributes to major sectoral institutions, such as The Place, as a board member. As well as being responsible for the company’s main stage repertoire Watson is also highly committed to its community relationships and educational roles. Phoenix is famous for being founded as a black dance company, emerging originally from the Harehills and Chapeltown communities in Leeds. A company biography, predating Watson’s appointment as Artistic Director by a couple of years, is titled Dancing the Black Question (Adair 2007). However, as becomes apparent within the interview, Watson has made a point of renegotiating that image with the press, community and public to position the company as primarily a contemporary dance organisation which also has strong community relationships and educational ethics.

I met Ferdinand Richard at Culture Action Europe’s conference at Gateshead in October 201413. Richard is Chair of the Roberto Cimetta Fund, which supports mobility of artists between Europe and the Arab world and Head of UNESCO’s Expert Panel for the International Fund for Cultural Diversity. He is a former professional rock musician who now leads a not-for-profit music development organisation in Marseille, working extensively with young people (Aide aux Musiques Innovatrices). Richard sparked my interest through contributions to workshop sessions around the idea of European Capitals of Culture (Marseille was ECoC in 2013), particularly regarding his experience of trying to relate the work of a grass roots organisation and its communities to a central corporate programme that was more focused on developing international profile and tourism outcomes. I approached him for an interview in response. I then found that he also had political experience as head of a cultural commission for France’s Green Party. Richard therefore operates both as activist and funder, artist and organiser, with a diverse range of international reference points informing his analysis of policy interventions.

Sue Hoyle was identified from the outset an essential interviewee for this research. As Director of the Clore Leadership Programme (since 2008) she heads up Europe’s most significant agency dedicated to the development of cultural leadership. Hoyle has been involved in the Clore Programme from the beginning, being Deputy Director during Chris Smith’s tenure from 2003. She has overseen its more recent expansion into the international arena, particularly through connections with Hong Kong University. With a professional background in dance, Hoyle has also had senior roles with English National Ballet, Arts Council England, the British Council (in France) and The Place. Her interpretations of cultural leadership as a concept are therefore highly significant and influential.

Pablo Rossello, at the time of the interview (October 2014), was Acting Director of Creative Economy for the British Council (BC) in London. Rossello had previously operated the Cultural Leadership International programme for BC (from 2009-11, when his unit was called Creative Industries), which had been based on the UK’s Cultural Leadership Programme. Rossello, originally from Spain, was able to add further context from outside the UK, particularly in relation to the development of cultural

13 Culture Action Europe is an advocacy organisation and cultural network based in Brussels (www.cultureactioneurope.org ), part funded by the European Commission through EACEA, which campaigns for an enhanced role for culture in public policy and European democracy.

29 leadership as a UK commodity for export. Alongside Sue Hoyle he is another key professional actively engaged in recent years with developing the definition of cultural leadership as concept, skillset and policy priority.

Cluny Macpherson is currently Chief Officer for Culture and Sport at Leeds City Council. He was previously Regional Director for Arts Council England’s Yorkshire office and comes from a background in music performance, street arts and folk. Macpherson has direct experience as a grass roots musician and community activist as well as cultural policy maker and funder’s representative at city, regional and national levels. At Leeds he balances the arts with sport, libraries and heritage portfolios, and was a senior manager at ACE during the time when libraries, museums and archives were brought into the organisation’s remit. Macpherson therefore has particular insight into how the cultural sector is currently constituted and defined in a UK policy context and how this relates to the practicalities of regional development.

Emma Tregidden and Dawn Fuller are co-Directors of Leeds based company Space 2, which they describe as an ‘arts for social change’ organisation (Tregidden & Fuller 2014). Both are longstanding community arts activists with wide ranging arts production experience in other companies (including Phoenix Dance and Interplay Theatre). Tregidden and Fuller were selected for the combination of production expertise and a social approach that explores the potential for project participants to be identified as leaders within their work. They have collaborative relationships with other Leeds organisations represented in the research (West Yorkshire Playhouse, Phoenix Dance, Leeds City Council) and provide an alternative critical perspective on the city’s cultural development.

Julie Ward MEP is a Labour member of the European Parliament, representing the North West of England and first elected in May 2014. Previously a longstanding cultural activist and founder of Jack Drum Arts (County Durham) she is rare among British MPs and MEPs in having previously earned her living an artist, and brings that practical experience to her role as a member of the European Parliaments Committee on Culture and Education. Ward therefore has experience both of local cultural activism and the development of EU legislation.

Jane Spiers is Chief Executive of Aberdeen Performing Arts, operating the city’s three principal receiving houses (His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen Music Hall and The Lemon Tree). Spiers occupies arguably the most prominent individual role in Aberdeen’s arts scene and took up the post simultaneously with the start of my research in the autumn of 2012. She worked previously in leadership positions at Horsecross Arts in Perth and Stirling Tolbooth and has a track record of securing significant capital funding for development of her venues. Her earlier career was in publishing and she worked in a community bookshop and literacy centre in south-east London before taking up roles in local government arts management and the Regional Arts Boards in England.

Janet Archer is the Chief Executive of Creative Scotland. With a background in professional dance as performer, choreographer and founder of her own company, she also worked for Arts Council England as a development officer in the North Eastern region before becoming Head of Dance nationally. Charged with renewing Creative Scotland’s relationship with the sector following a period of organisational crisis and the high profile departure of her predecessor in late 2012, Archer obviously occupies a significant leadership role in her own right. Creative Scotland also has a corporate commitment to the development of artistic leaders, funding a dedicated Clore Fellowship on an annual basis as well as four places on the Extend Leadership programme for the visual arts, run by the National Association for Gallery Education (engage).14

As a group, the interviewees include overseers of two major cultural leadership programmes (Hoyle, Rossello); multiple representation from each of the worlds of theatre, dance, music, literature and the visual arts; at least five current or former Arts Council representatives; several operators of other funding schemes and architects of cultural policy, both from private and public sectors; a combination of freelance, organisational and senior management experience; several politicians, campaigners and activists; and many forms of commitment to education, community development, arts in health and other social agendas. Between they are active in various ways within all three domains of artistic leadership as identified in the Artist as Leader

14 Research interviewee James Brining (West Yorkshire Playhouse) has also been involved with Extend as an expert contributor to its residential programme [see http://engage.org/UltimateEditorInclude/UserFiles/Files/Projects/Extend/Application%202014- 15/Information%20for%20Applicants%20from%20Scotland.pdf. Accessed 4th May 2015]

31 research (aesthetic, organisational and public realm). Community, city, regional, national and international levels of responsibility are each represented. Nearly half the overall cohort has significant experience of working both in English and Scottish contexts (Fremantle, Glass, Dods, Ormston, Brining, Archer, Spiers, Matarasso). Three contributors are permanently based outside the UK (Pasquali, Gessler, Richard), while several contribute regularly to international programmes and collaborations (Ormston, Hoyle, Ward, Marriott, Matarasso) or take creative work outside the UK (Watson, Rossello).

Generally, their backgrounds reflect my primary interest in the implications of cultural leadership issues specifically for the arts, although in terms of wider definitions of culture there are also at least two current or former heads of museums and library services (Macpherson, Ormston), others with briefs that cut across broader definitions of culture including heritage and the creative industries (Archer, Ward, Rossello, Gessler), plus additional strategic experience of working with film and media (Pasquali, Ormston). This is not to say that all these areas were necessarily explored in great depth within the interviews as topics in their own right, but the reflections on cultural leadership produced by the group as a whole are informed by their broad collective understanding of creative and cultural sector issues and definitions. What I have sought to ensure is that the overall discourse is not limited to the reference points or habits of thought derived from any one individual sub-sector and that the predominant UK national outlook does not go unchallenged.

In most cases I travelled to visit the interviewee at a location convenient for them, often visiting their place of work (or, in the case of Roanne Dods, her home), and conducting the interview as a private conversation. The main exception to this was my very first interview, with François Matarasso. This was done as a public event in Aberdeen as part of the Discussions Around the Research Table (DART) seminar series produced by Gray’s School of Art.15 The recording and transcript of that conversation are from the live event and include some additional questions and observations offered from the floor during the second half. The session and my questions were informed by a preparatory conversation earlier the same day and by some previous email correspondence. I am grateful to him for his time and guidance as well as the insights that emerged from the interview itself. This exchange was important in shaping the

15 Details of the DART sessions can be found at: https://discussionsart.wordpress.com/

32 direction of the research. In particular it alerted me to the gap between rhetoric and action in cultural governance and led me towards engagement with the longer term histories of cultural policy against which the significance of contemporary interventions can be much more clearly read. Matarasso has formative experience as a community arts activist which continues to inform his writing, while, having served on the Arts Council of England as committee member and as a writer for think tank Comedia (as well as independently), he has substantial strategic knowledge of the sector and a wide range of research and case studies to draw on (in England, Scotland and internationally). He is widely known as the author of Use or Ornament (Matarasso 1997), a much debated contribution to thinking on the social outcomes associated with the arts, which had influenced me as a young arts officer in Leeds from the late 1990s onwards, working to develop and advocate for cultural projects using government and European regeneration funding.16 These discussions with Matarasso therefore had the additional value of allowing me to relate my own direct professional experience to continuing critical debates, in particular alerting me to the ways in which community based cultural work risked being co-opted by broader and cruder political projects. It is also appropriate to acknowledge here that Matarasso is a former Clore Fellow, as mentioned on the Artist as Leader blog page.17 However, I was unaware of this at the point when we met (Matarasso is not listed among the alumni on the Clore Leadership Programme’s web pages) and this part of his experience was not discussed during our interview.

Most of the subsequent interviews also involved some advance correspondence and all interviewees were made aware in advance of the main subject of the research as well as my interest in specific aspects of their experience. This obviously meant introducing some of the basic terminology of cultural leadership as well as mentioning the context of the Artist as Leader research (with which some interviewees had in any case been previously involved); some of that language may have been reflected back, and this group of people may have spoken more familiarly and fluently about concepts

16 Matarasso’s book has been criticised as part of the tendency towards arts research being produced as a form of advocacy, ultimately used to justify instrumental government policy (Belfiore 2009: 353), a charge that he himself has challenged while recognising the limitations of inherited terminology such as ‘impact’ when applied to the arts (Matarasso 2010). The criticism has also been put into context by Robert Hewison (2014: 72-3) who identifies Use or Ornament’s place as a response to John Myerscough’s persuasive but financially reductive Thatcher-era report The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain (Myerscough 1988). Hewison emphasises the modesty of Matarasso’s original call for a ‘marginal repositioning of social policy priorities’ (Matarasso 1997: 85). 17 https://ontheedgeresearch.org/artist-as-leader-2007-09/

33 such as ‘cultural leadership’ than would be generally the case in the sector. They weren’t, however, given the specific questions in advance, so while interviewees’ reflections on their own values, histories and practices generally came across as well considered they were also spontaneously expressed rather than rehearsed. In any case, the intention was not to surprise interviewees with leftfield questions or to approach the subject by stealth. Where I did introduce unexpected angles, in a few more improvised questions, I noticed that they tended to produce rather superficial responses from interviewees, less considered and more uncertain. The real value of the interviewees has been as professional experts whose practical understanding of messy experience could serve as a reality check for the theoretical concepts, historical overviews and official rhetoric emerging from much of the relevant literature. Of course, interviewees also introduce their own concepts, overviews and rhetoric. The analytical challenge of this research has been to find relationships between all the perspectives represented, using each as a lens to focus the other.

In several cases I attended or participated in additional events/activities involving the interviewees or their organisations to help inform my understanding of their work and perspective. These included theatre presentations, exhibitions, launches and conference events. Many interviewees were selected on the basis of previous working relationships and in two cases I have an ongoing professional interest: West Yorkshire Playhouse (James Brining interview), where I am a voluntary member of an advisory panel for education and arts development, and EACEA (Barbara Gessler and Arnaud Pasquali) where I am an occasional external grant assessor. The aim of the research has not been to evaluate or interrogate the role of these organisations, or the success of these individuals as leaders, but to gain insight into the nature and usefulness of prevailing definitions of cultural leadership in relation to their work. In this context, I would argue that such prior knowledge and relationships do not constitute conflicts of interest but instead provide additional perspectives on these situations as places of encounter between policy and practice.

The choice of interviews as a primary technique related to the type of information required. First of all, it was quickly apparent from early reviews of literature and from scoping out the research questions that the enquiry would take me into questions about values, assumptions and ethics. It was also apparent that the cultural sector was already awash with statistics and attempts to quantify or measure the results of

34 funding and activities. I had no need or desire to add to this mass of data; rather, my motivation was to better understand the interplay of values going on beneath it.

The value of these interviews depends on seeing them in context and understanding the individual perspective of each interviewee. The epistemological approach adopted here follows Alvesson’s outline of reflective pragmatism (Alvesson 2003), which is consistent with the discourse-based method subsequently used for analysis. For Alvesson, this approach ‘stands for conscious and consistent efforts to view the subject matter from different angles’, avoiding ‘a single favoured angle and vocabulary’ (ibid. 25). The interview is seen as text rather than data: as a context-specific expression to be interpreted through relation to other texts, not as an authoritative account or revelation of truth. For these reasons, the interview programme did not use a standard set of questions to build an aggregated response and final position, but individually tailored questions to explore the unique combination of experience and outlook represented by each contributor and to pick up on themes and concerns emerging over the course of the research. This included responses to the success or otherwise of lines of questioning from each preceding interview.

2.4. Uses of literature

Relevant literature is reviewed in the next chapter (3), but as part of the technique of the research has been to relate the literature to interview texts, using each as a check upon the other, it is worth outlining how its different areas contribute to the overall method of enquiry. The literature divides into four broad categories: - policy documents (reports and statements from public bodies and other funders or development agencies about their priorities and intended use of resources, including the forms and guidance issued through which other parties can apply for funding or other opportunities such as training; also research documents directly investigating the implementation of such policies); - histories (accounts of the trajectory of cultural policy as well as histories of individual organisations); - critical theory (broadly, tools for the interpretation and contextualisation of policy, including political philosophy and cultural theory);

- research techniques (practical and theoretical underpinnings of methodology including interpretation of primary material through discourse analysis). Inevitably, some individual works cited will straddle categories or sit between them (particularly those areas of policy related research which combine a policy focus with critical theory), but these general categories are intended to indicate the overall range and scope of the research.

Interviews are related to literature in the first two of these categories (policy and history) through the approaches suggested by theory. My attempt has been to check the assertions of policy, in terms of what it says it can or will achieve, through the prism of experience (that of my interviewees but inevitably also influenced by my own), with reflexive recognition of the partiality of individual perspectives. By looking at the language used in policy I have sought to understand the characteristics of prevailing discourse, seeking out its assumptions and exclusions. I am conscious that at least three linguistic registers can co-exist: there is an obvious potential contrast between that of cultural policy, particularly as it is expressed in writing, and that of creative practice as it emerges in experience-based description (whether from the perspective of practitioners, audiences or other participants); but there is also what could be termed ‘policy as it is practiced’ or the language of every day governance. In other words, those who seek to implement policy also have to present, describe and discuss it verbally with sectoral professionals in the context of funding processes and other practical issues, translating the grander and more abstract aims of overarching policy into more tangible managerial targets. Other ways of characterising these forms of dialogue could no doubt be conceived, but the point is that cultural professionals necessarily move between them, while perhaps remaining as individuals more or less comfortable in one or other general register. Some are fluent in policy-speak, and some are very proud to find it all incomprehensible. What interests me is where particular terms have different connotational (and perhaps even denotational) value depending on who’s using them and in which context. The literature, by definition, provides all the examples of formal policy language as it is written, so its analysis is essential to revealing the interplay between different orders of discourse and forms a complement to interpretation of the interviews.

2.5. Events, discussions, networks

In describing my method it is also relevant to acknowledge the context in which the research has been developed and the various relationships and discussions that have influenced my thinking. Work at Gray’s has by no means been a solitary activity and, quite apart from the role of academic supervisors, it has been supported by a range of more or less formal exchanges with other researchers. In particular, a fortnightly Reading Group has been a forum for shared exploration of theory and philosophy between researchers in art and design with occasional input from colleagues in architecture and anthropology. Two or three themes have emerged from these sessions in ways I have found significant: one has been a strand of thinking about metaphor, which has alerted me to the ways that meaning is constructed and framed in all areas of discourse. While strong metaphors can be useful and valuable tools for communicating ideas by highlighting or dramatising particular features, by the same token they can exclude or obscure others. A metaphor is a selective magnifier, and therefore in political discourse can be made to serve particular interests. Its place in leadership theory has also been significant (Alvesson & Spicer 2011).

Another recurrent theme was the problematic nature of certain overused and tired terms populating cultural and political texts, terms such as ‘community’, ‘participation’, ‘creativity’, and – not least – ‘culture’ itself, which often seem to be deployed with a misleading assumption that there is a commonly shared meaning or value behind them. Discussions at Gray’s about the contested meanings lurking within these terms led, amongst other things, to a collaborative panel presentation at International Perspectives on Participation and Engagement in the Arts, a conference held in Utrecht in June 2014, where four of us took issue with identification of a current ‘agenda’ of participation in the arts, arguing instead that common terminology can serve multiple agendas and conceal important differences in values and intent (Price 2015). This awareness also informs my analysis of cultural policy documents, which often use such terms uncritically and without clear definition. Our collective sensitivity to these issues was influenced by the fact that the group at Gray’s included several practice-led researchers experienced in navigating the different assumptions and understandings of artists, funders, commissioners and various communities. Related to this, an additional theme was the connection – or tension – between art and politics. To what extent should an artist be concerned with the political circumstances within

37 which their work is created? This has become a key question for me in thinking about the place of the artist in what can be called cultural leadership.

Two other events should be credited as part of the enquiry and influential on my development and understanding of the interviews. These are Culture Action Europe’s (CAE) 2014 conference in Newcastle and Gateshead and European performing arts network IETM’s 2015 Satellite Meeting in Brussels.18 Both events allowed me to engage with European and other international perspectives on issues bearing on cultural leadership and to broaden the scope of my thinking. The CAE event specifically gave me the chance to meet interviewees Ferdinand Richard and Julie Ward for the first time. The IETM event was organised with collaboration from the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA) and provided insight into how Arts Councils from Australia to the Netherlands are engaging with ideas of public and cultural value to rethink their decision making and evidence gathering processes. Apart from anything else it was a welcome reminder that despite the difficulties of effecting positive change among policy makers there are plenty of committed people out there willing to give it a go.

Finally, I should acknowledge the methodological significance of my own professional background and motivations (as outlined in 1.2.2 above). Working at Gray’s in a heavily practice-led research environment encourages reflection on the connection between research and professional experience. My own approach is quite traditional by comparison with the innovations of my artist peers at Gray’s but I write with awareness that personal history undoubtedly shapes my concerns and interpretations, and it is the basis for the selection of interviewees. I have made one specific use of my experience in Chapter 5 (5.2.1), which I hope complements the other perspectives represented in the research rather than intruding on the analysis.

18 The Culture Action Europe conference, entitled ‘Beyond the Obvious’, took place from 9-11 October 2014. The IETM Satellite Meeting, ‘The Art of Valuing’. took place on 17-18 February 2015. A review of this event is included in the thesis as Appendix 23 (also available online at http://ontheedgeresearch.org/2015/03/04/the-art-of-valuing).

Chapter 3: Literature review and analysis

3.1 Role and typology of literature in the research

A dynamic engagement with relevant literature is a central part of this research. Cultural leadership emerged as a concept largely within policy research and training- related literature from the early 2000s onwards, producing a recent history which can itself be situated within longer term narratives of cultural policy development and wider theories of management and leadership. As political and economic contexts evolve, the leadership challenges in the cultural sector are continually reframed. The possible definitions of cultural leadership inevitably depend on these changes, and the research therefore demands an ongoing relationship with documented developments in policy and responses derived from cultural sector practice, pedagogy and research.

The literature relevant to this research can be categorised in a number of ways. As outlined in 2.4 above, it takes form in policy writing, histories and theoretical or methodological texts. More specifically, in terms of subject matter, it includes material written directly about cultural and artistic leadership (such as Hewison & Holden 2002; Douglas & Fremantle 2009; Kay & Venner 2010; TBR 2013); work on leadership and management originating from other areas of business (Bass 1990; Adler 2006; Marturano & Gosling 2008; Alvesson & Spicer 2011); literature constituting, critiquing or documenting cultural policy (Hewison 1995, 2014; Smith 1998; Hesmondhalgh 2007; Arts Council England 2013; Bell & Oakley 2015); and areas of cultural, political and aesthetic theory underpinning the wider contexts in which issues of cultural policy and practice are situated (Williams 1965; Sieber 1981; Arendt 1998; Belfiore & Bennett 2008; Gielen 2015a). In terms of origin, it can be divided between various sectors. Much of the primary material concerning official policy is, unsurprisingly, produced within or on behalf of the public sector (including local and national government, European Union bodies, Arts Councils and other development agencies), although reports and proposals from major private trusts and foundations are also influential and this review draws particularly on key documents produced in relation to the Clore Leadership Programme (Hewison & Holden 2002; TBR 2013). Academic sources provide both the theoretical basis and the bulk of policy analysis, with further

39 contributions from consultancies, think tanks and journalists which range in character from data gathering to critique and advocacy. Writing on cultural leadership has come from each of these directions, albeit unevenly. Educators, training providers and public sector bodies have diagnosed the cultural sector’s challenges and proposed course content and development programmes (Hewison & Holden 2002; Arts Council England 2006, 2012; Kuhlke et al. 2015a). Cultural sector professionals have reflected on their practice and responded to the training provision available to them (Douglas & Fremantle 2009; Kay & Venner 2010). There is also plenty of academic writing on cultural policy and arts management issues as well as an ‘explosion of interest’ in the related topic of cultural entrepreneurship (Kuhlke et al. 2015b: 8), but relatively little work critically addressing the concept of cultural leadership and the way it has been defined and developed as a priority area for training and development within the sector in the UK and internationally. An early task for the research was to establish a historical account of the development of cultural leadership as a term in policy and training, drawing out the underlying values and structural relationships shaping the discourse, as this appeared to be absent from the available literature. The review begins by constructing this narrative. Through engagement with the literature it then draws out the longer term forms of cultural history on which the meaning of cultural leadership discourse depends.

3.2 From arts administration to cultural leadership

The specific discourse of cultural leadership in the UK can be traced to a 2002 report by Robert Hewison and John Holden for the Clore Duffield Foundation which directly informed the establishment of the Clore Leadership Programme (Hewison & Holden 2002). Prior to this date, the term itself is not apparent in policy or training literature, so it looks to be a fresh coinage, at least in a UK context. Some pre-history can be reconstructed from scattered references in arts policy and training literature. For many years previously, to the extent that management of the arts was recognised as a distinct profession, it tended to be filed under the more prosaic label of ‘arts administration’, as captured in the title of John Pick’s pioneering handbook (Pick 1980), which was still the only major guide specifically relating to arts sector management practice that I could find available when beginning work in local authority arts

40 development nearly twenty years later. Going further back, Christopher Gordon and Peter Stark have noted that as early as 1970 Professor Roy Shaw, then a noted educationalist and an unpaid advisor to Arts Minister Jennie Lee, ‘struggled to win the Arts Council’s support for training a small number of “arts administrators”’ (Gordon & Stark 2010) - arguably the first step on the path to a national programme of professional leadership training for the sector and creating a link to its place in academic study. Shaw became Secretary-General of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1975 and by the following year was also a Visiting Professor in Arts Administration at London’s City University, where Pick was Director of Arts Administration Studies (Moody 2002). The language may still have been that of administration, but recognition that this area of work was one which warranted development at national level had begun and was to take root internationally during the 1980s. The European Network of Cultural Administration Training Centres (ENCATC), a European Commission funded organisation now representing over 120 members in 40 countries, traces its own origins back to a meeting of European culture ministers held in Sintra, Portugal, in 1987 (ENCATC 2015).19 This led to a first international meeting of arts management training providers in Hamburg later the same year, followed by a Council of Europe conference on cultural management education in Barcelona in 1990, and then the establishment of a formal network with the first ENCATC conference being held in Warsaw in 1992 (ibid.). In the UK at this time, there is no evidence of any concerted effort to develop leaders or managers across the cultural sector’s constituent parts of arts, libraries and heritage, nor of the existence of any post-graduate programmes in arts leadership (Hewison 2004), although some individual training courses were in place at sub-sectoral level. Use of the term ‘leader’ appears with the establishment of the Museum Leaders Programme at the University of East Anglia in 1993, which was identified by Hewison as the only leadership programme of any kind in the cultural sector at that time – although limited to an intake of 12 individuals per year for a two week course, and obviously specific to museum and heritage professionals (Hewison 2004).

Holden and Hewison’s coinage of ‘cultural leadership’ may have been fresh in a British cultural policy context but it is not absolutely original. An earlier use of the term appears in the title of a 1995 symposium in Boston, “Cultural Leadership in America”

19 ENCATC maintains the acronym but is now known publicly as the ‘European network on cultural management and cultural policy education’ (private correspondence with GiannaLia Cogliandro Beyens, ENCATC Secretary General, 3rd October 2015).

41 which resulted in a book of the same name (Corn 1998). Exploring the history of ‘art matronage and patronage’, this set of papers examines the role of philanthropists and private collectors, and in particular the role of women, in gallery and museum development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States. It demonstrates the significant influence of these wealthy benefactors in shaping public tastes in visual art and defining the conditions of economic success for favoured artists in those periods. With these individuals going on to found major institutions such as the symposium’s own host and publisher, Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the book also outlines the long term influence of these essentially amateur or self- taught enthusiasts operating beyond the established professional sphere of artists, critics and academies. Cultural leadership is therefore defined in this tradition as a role that can be played by whoever has the will and the means to influence the circumstances of cultural production and reception, with implications for the aesthetic, institutional and economic development of artistic practice. It employs the ‘refinement’ definition of culture in a much purer way than is generally the case in cultural policy.20 This definition can be usefully contrasted with the habitual understanding of cultural leadership underlying British policy discourse, which emphasises the role of cultural sector professionals operating within existing institutions. It is a reminder of the significant influence both on practice and on the relationship of the arts to the public that can be exerted from outside of the recognised cultural sector. This begins to suggest a distinction that can be made between a broader concept of ‘cultural leadership’ as a sphere of influence and the role of more narrowly defined professional ‘cultural leaders’. It also identifies a role for cultural leadership in developing artistic taste and aesthetic values, rather than being a synonym for cultural management or extension of arts administration.

3.3 The establishment of cultural leadership

Holden and Hewison’s 2002 report effectively marks the beginning of cultural leadership discourse in a UK cultural policy context. The report’s own reference points go back no further than 1997 with the Holland report into concerns about the quality of management and leadership in the Museums and Heritage sector (Hewison & Holden

20 See 1.4.1 above.

2002). They quote similar concerns expressed in 2000 by Metier, the performing arts skills development agency, in relation to its own constituency; by a Task Force report for the DCMS into museums, ‘Renaissance for the Regions’, which complained of morale issues and a lack of ‘high-calibre entrants’ into the sector (Resource 2001: 10); and by the 2000 Boyden report for the Arts Council of England into English regional producing theatres, of which they note its language of ‘crisis’ and warnings about the over-regulation of the sector, another factor affecting morale (Hewison & Holden 2002). Leadership, managerial and training inadequacies in the museum, theatre and arts sectors are thus presented as endemic. Hewison’s 2004 reflection on the same topic, The Crisis of Cultural Leadership, additionally references specific managerial and financial crises at flagship cultural institutions (including The Royal Opera House, English National Opera, The British Museum and The Royal Shakespeare Company) all taking place between 1997 and 2002 (Hewison 2004). The leadership crisis was situated at the heart of the British cultural establishment and the literature evidences a gathering consensus across cultural sub-sectors that something had to be done, particularly as it chimed with a wider leadership malaise being expressed across British business (Hewison 2004; Kay 2010).

The Clore Leadership Programme became a major part of the response to this crisis and its status was cemented by the appointment of the outgoing Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Chris Smith, as its first director. The parameters of cultural leadership as a term in policy discourse were thus established in relation to a national concern for the operation and sustainability of high profile publicly funded organisations which could not be allowed to fail. The concept is ontologically motivated by concerns about maintenance and continuity, which can be seen recurring in more recent, post- recessional UK cultural leadership and creative policy developments which emphasise the need for organisational resilience (Arts Council England 2012; Creative Scotland 2013; TBR 2013; see also 3.7 below). In between these very different periods of crisis, the literature and initiatives become more optimistic, with the 2006 initiation of the government’s own Cultural Leadership Programme providing a pinnacle, amid a growing sense that the sector might have expertise of its own worth capturing and exporting (Arts Council England 2006).

The Cultural Leadership Programme operated between 2006-11 and produced one significant contribution to the literature, The Cultural Leadership Reader (Kay & Venner

2010), which was presumably planned as a statement of the Programme’s developing vision but became instead its testament, published a few months before it was dismantled. The Reader is a collection of short essays and thematic pieces, some written by researchers and many contributed by cultural sector managers as reflections on practice. Co-editor Katie Venner’s introduction emphasises this empirical foundation of cultural leadership development, quoting Donald Schön’s (1983) The Reflective Practitioner as a model for the approach being taken (Venner 2010: 6). The texts make occasional reference to the changing times. In particular, Graham Leicester’s article is notable for challenging cultural leadership’s discourse of organisational improvement at a moment when the values of the sector are under threat: ‘In today’s challenging times we need a more expansive understanding of cultural leadership’ (Leicester 2010: 17). Within the sector, he argued, ‘the default understanding is still about leading successful arts and cultural organisations. Beyond the sector I find more interest in a broader framing: leading the culture’ (ibid. 18). Leicester argues that cultural leadership going forward should be framed as ‘creative transgression of the dominant culture’ (ibid. 17), a call to arms which demands ‘a potent combination of political awareness and cultural imagination’ (ibid.).

Sue Kay also begins to open up space for thinking about cultural leadership differently, recognising it ‘as discourse’ and focusing on questions of ‘how do we talk about cultural leadership, who is doing the talking… and what does such talk bring into view’ (Kay 2010: 10). This marks a change in thinking on the topic in that it begins to open up questions of who has access to the discourse and how it is constructed. Other contributions follow this up by raising issues about diversity within the workforce, particularly women and ethnic minorities at senior level (Ladkin; Williams 2010). Dawn Langley, meanwhile, questions another assumption frequently present in the discourse, which is that leadership is a good thing and therefore developing more of it will necessarily be beneficial. Observing that ‘leadership is a political act’ (Langley 2010: 68), she argues that ‘it is crucial to a robust development process to adopt a critical stance; to examine underlying power relations and assumptions; to unpack the multiple discourses… and not to neglect the emotional and social context’ (ibid. 69). Many of the articles attempt to identify characteristics that may be specific to cultural leadership, emphasising the role of relationships, partnerships or improvisation (Murch 2010; Norbury 2010; Parker 2010), or review the applicability of elements from broader leadership theory to cultural settings (Burns & Wilson 2010; Godfrey 2010).

3.4 Artists as leaders

3.4.1 Culture means business

By the mid-2000s attention was being paid to cultural leadership not just in terms of concern about how cultural organisations could be better led, but also with attempts ‘to capture the elusive spirit of creativity’ (Hewison 2014: 45) and identify the possible lessons that artists and creative sector professionals could teach in turn to other areas of business (Adler 2006). In the UK, ‘Creative Britain’ had been launched by Chris Smith in 1998 as a forward looking brand for the DCMS to promote (Smith 1998), leading to the first Creative Industries Mapping Document produced by the department during the same year (Hewison 2014: 42). Thanks in part to a rather dubious inclusion of copyright-dependent computer software developers as part of its constituency, this publication defined into existence a surprisingly large sector of 1.4 million workers, which by the time of the 2001 update of the figures was growing at double the rate of the economy as a whole and accounting for 5% of GDP (ibid). The trend continued: by 2004 the sector claimed to account for 8% of Gross Value Added in the UK economy, as compared to 4% in 1997, with a workforce now of 1.8 million, growing at 6% per annum (Holden 2007: 1). Creativity was a success story, and it seemed to promise the kind of snake oil that other areas of business were looking for.

In 2005, the DCMS appointed James Purnell as the first Minister for the Creative Industries and initiated a Creative Economy Programme in combination with the Department for Trade and Industry (Hewison 2014: 43). At the same time, Sir George Cox published a report on Creativity in Business for the Treasury – dismissed as a ‘dead letter’ by Hewison in terms of its ability to pin down creativity’s alchemic secrets (ibid. 45), but enough to prompt the Arts & Humanities Research Council to establish a ‘Research Networks and Workshops (Creativity) Scheme’ in 2006 to investigate ‘the nature of creativity in business and the economy’ (Douglas & Fremantle 2009: 6-7). The Cox review’s figures also proved convincing to Gordon Brown (Hewison 2006: 12) who enthusiastically declared that ‘the Cultural Leadership Programme will create new opportunities for collaboration across the public and business sectors’ (Arts Council England 2006: 5) which would be of benefit ‘not simply to you, in the cultural world, but

45 also to business itself who will learn from you’ (quoted in Hewison 2006: 12).21 Hewison had mused in 2004 that ‘there is still work to be done on identifying what is specific to cultural leadership as opposed to the generic concept of leadership as such’ (Hewison 2004: 165); there was now an appetite to find out, and a conviction that there was something to be found. This belief was by no means limited to the UK. In America, also during 2004, even as sober an organ as the Harvard Business Review would gush ‘The MFA is the new MBA…An arts degree is now perhaps the hottest credential in the world of business’ (quoted in Adler 2006: 486). Established practices were being challenged by new trends in business such as globalisation, the eclipse of nation states by multi-nationals, fast rates of change, technological advance and the demand for ideas which can keep up; the arts were looked to for their inspirational and improvisational qualities and as ways of connecting business practice with non-market values (Adler 2006). Dana Gioia neatly summarised the argument in his Chairman’s preface to a subsequent report for America’s National Endowment for the Arts: ‘the new American economy depends on imagination, innovation, and creativity, and those are the skills that artists develop, nurture, and promote’ (National Endowment for the Arts 2008: iv).

3.4.2. Scenarios of artistic leadership

With its research element funded by the AHRC’s new Cox report-inspired ‘creativity’ scheme (and also, in part, by the Cultural Leadership Programme), the ‘Artist as Leader’ project, which took place in the UK between 2006-8, can be seen as a direct response to this new agenda. Its content and scope, however, served to diversify the discourse around cultural leadership, particularly with The Artist as Leader research report (Douglas & Fremantle 2009).

The overall Artist as Leader programme involved a partnership between four organisations: On The Edge Research (represented by Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle), the Cultural Enterprise Office (Deborah Keogh), Performing Arts Labs

21 The first quote is from Brown’s introduction to the Cultural Leadership Programme’s launch document, which pointedly featured the Chancellor’s words ahead of those of the Culture Secretary. The DCMS had succeeded in getting the Treasury interested in culture (be careful what you wish for). The second phrase comes from his speech at the programme launch, 20th June 2006.

(Susan Benn) and the Scottish Leadership Foundation (Zoë van Zwanenberg). Anne Douglas and theatre director Tim Nunn acted as lab co-directors. The Cultural Enterprise Office is a support service for creative businesses in Scotland and, at the time, had a significant focus on the development of leadership skills (Douglas & Fremantle 2007: 7). This interest was explored through methodology already developed by Performing Arts Labs and the laboratory part of the programme resulted in a week-long residency at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath, in January 2008 and a two- day event at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow, the following June (Douglas & Fremantle 2009: 47). These events, exploring the relationship of leadership to artistic practice, involved many of the interviewees contributing to Douglas and Fremantle’s concurrent research project.22 Their 2009 report and the related Leading through practice (Douglas & Fremantle 2007), published through a-n at an earlier stage of the research, emphasise the significance of the ways in which artists themselves inhabit leadership roles which are not necessarily tied to their position within organisations or hierarchies.

Leadership appears in this research as ‘a process, rather than a status’ (Douglas & Fremantle 2009: 28), while ‘the relationship between individual practice and organisational leadership is by no means straightforward… artists who manifest the ability to lead do not necessarily want to enter positions of organisational leadership’ (ibid. 27). Forms of collaborative practice and collective organisation are also considered, further differentiating the process of leadership from the role of the individual leader, such as in relation to what is meant by ‘artist-led’ practices, particularly within the visual arts (ibid. 29). Interesting among these is artist Reiko Goto’s experience of the ‘reciprocal process of leading and following’ when working in cross-disciplinary settings, a notion which, as the authors note, ‘breaks down the underlying assumption that leading and following are different’ (ibid. 28). In several cases a close relationship between artists’ work and their political, ethical and environmental concerns becomes apparent, where their leadership role is about embodying and problematizing these agendas through artistic processes more than it is about running organisations, having responsibility or taking hierarchical roles.23

22 The research aimed to situate the practice-oriented lab activity in the wider context of cultural leadership development in the UK (private conversation with Anne Douglas, 7th February 2016). 23 As articulated during an interview by Jackie Kay: ‘my artistic sensibility and my political sensibility are one’ (Douglas & Fremantle 2009: 32), or in accounts of the environmentally responsive work of James Marriott (Platform) and filmmaker Matt Hulse (ibid. 33).

Many of these insights and reflections sit awkwardly with the discourse of cultural leadership developed from policy. They do not exactly add up to a distinct “artistic” leadership style, but they at least raise questions about whether the prevailing theories and models of cultural leadership adequately take artistic practice into account and what they would look like if they did. They also open up questions of the relationship of cultural and artistic leaders to social and political issues in the public realm, and to relationships beyond their own immediate area of practice. This leads to one of the key conclusions of the report, which is that:

… cultural leadership should be about more than simply well run cultural organisations… The current and emerging leaders of cultural organisations need to understand the capacity of artists to lead through practice, not least because they so often negotiate with other sectors to involve artists. (ibid. 38)

The report also identifies a corresponding imperative for artists to understand the wider contexts in which they themselves are situated: ‘in order to retain a degree of autonomy and critical positioning artists need to be conversant with policy developments’ (ibid. 7). This highlights a sense in which leaders also need to be informed and aware; if artists are to play such a role, then they cannot do so from an insular position within their discipline. Perhaps most importantly, at a structural level, the Artist as Leader report differentiates three different scenarios in which artists can be said to demonstrate influence: within the expertise of their art form, including its aesthetic and technical development; at an organisational level, as leaders within their companies, institutions or other networks; and within the public realm, setting or contributing to cultural and social agendas (ibid. 24-35). The perspective opened up through these scenarios underpins my own understanding of cultural leadership as a discursive structure.

Considering these three scenarios, it becomes apparent that the primary discourse around the ‘crisis’ of cultural leadership is almost entirely restricted to the organisational sphere. This goes back to the language and reference points of Hewison and Holden’s report for Clore Duffield, which was after all explicitly responding to financial and managerial crises at major institutions. Part of their intervention was indeed to introduce the term ‘leadership’ to sectoral debate as a way

48 of ‘promoting a more sympathetic attitude to the development of necessary skills’ (Hewison & Holden 2002)24 – an attempt to raise the sector’s ambitions and particularly to overcome reluctance by organisations in the sector to invest in relevant training at management level.25 However, despite the subsequent flurry of interest in the potential of artistic practice to liven up business leadership, the focus of concern within the policy discourse in relation to cultural leadership seems to have remained on managerial competences within organisational frameworks with a view to producing improved economic outcomes. It has been asked what creativity can do for business, but there seems to be much less attention on what leadership development can do for artistic vision, aesthetic development, or the public and social relevance of artists and the cultural sector. Moreover, since the financial crisis and in an atmosphere of public service cuts both, the possible implications of continued pressure for financial reinvention on creative development are spreading concern amongst analysts. The UK’s Warwick Commission has warned that further reductions to funding could damage the ‘ecosystem’ of culture, causing ‘a downward spiral in which fewer creative risks are taken, resulting in less talent development, declining returns and therefore further cuts in investment’ (Warwick Commission 2015: 14). European debates on cultural subsidy have highlighted the tension between achieving financial independence from the state whilst preserving intellectual and artistic freedom in relation to the market, a scenario in which two different ideas of ‘autonomy’ come into conflict (Gielen & Lijster 2015: 44).

If cultural leadership is pinned too closely to the organisational scenario then there is a danger that it becomes absorbed in the prosaic demands of survival and continuity with little capacity left for its creative mission or poetics. Some evidence for this tendency can be seen in TBR’s 2013 research for the Clore Leadership Programme, which identifies the top ten skills that cultural leaders feel it is important to develop (TBR 2013: 33, fig. 14). In order of ranking these are ‘leading people’ (selected by 10% of respondents); ‘fundraising and philanthropy’; ‘strategic planning’; ‘setting the vision’; ‘lobbying, advocacy and influence’ (all 9%); ‘effecting organisational change’ (7%); ‘developing partnerships and stakeholder relationships’ (6%); ‘financial planning’;

24 The report as made available on the Clore Leadership website is unpaginated, but this quote appears in the first paragraph under the sub-title ‘Leadership or management?’ in the middle of section 2. 25 A later report for the Cultural Leadership Programme noted that ‘whilst most public and private organisations invested between 1-3% of their turnover in professional development, the equivalent figure within the cultural sector was 0.3%’ (DTZ 2008: 6).

‘building the profile of the sector’; ‘developing policy and strategy’ (all 5%) (ibid.). Given that 72% of survey respondents worked in publicly funded settings the emphasis on fundraising and strategy is not surprising, but it is difficult to see where the role of artistic practice or any kind of cultural agenda-setting might sit among these ambitions. ‘Setting the vision’ might be the most likely, but it is notable that this is also the one which causes the authors to express surprise that so few leaders have selected it (ibid). Those respondents who identify as ‘leading artist/practitioner’ were half as likely as the overall cohort of leaders to identify fundraising as a development need, which does suggest that artists have different priorities. Meanwhile the report concludes that ‘existing training provision identified in the database tends to be focussed on the management role of a leader… [while] the skills leaders wish to develop are more closely tied with advocacy and influence’.

This suggests that cultural leadership development may, for a variety of historical reasons, be constricted by an overly managerial focus in provision and a lack of opportunity for artistic and relational priorities beyond the organisational sphere to be explored. Alongside this, it is notable how the language of this report is weighted to the organisational context. Words such as ‘organisation’ and ‘organisational’ appear over 100 times in its 47 pages, while terms like ‘artist’ or ‘artistic’ feature just 15 times, ‘social’ nine times, ‘community’ twice and ‘aesthetic’ not at all. TBR’s report is clearly focused, data rich and highly relevant in its identification of the gaps between current leadership development provision and developing demand. However, it operates within a particular linguistic framework. If, as the Artist as Leader research proposes, a significant part of how artists themselves have influence is through the cultural forms in which they operate and in the public realm, these scenarios do not appear to fit within the prevailing structure of cultural leadership discourse.

3.4.3 International dimensions of cultural leadership

There has been an international aspect to the discourse surrounding arts administration and management training since at least the mid-1980s with the developments, already mentioned, that led to establishment of the European Network of Cultural Administration Training Centres already mentioned (ENCATC 2015). In this

50 context, thinking around the idea of ‘cultural entrepreneurship’ has also developed since the early 1990s, coinciding closely with the growth of the ‘creative economy’ discourse in policy and rooted in similar concepts and literature, as Olaf Kuhlke and colleagues have demonstrated (Kuhlke et al. 2015b). However, introduction of the term ‘cultural leadership’ in Europe and elsewhere has taken place more recently, and available information is generally limited to the dedicated web pages of relevant initiatives.26 Its spread can be partly attributed to British influence: the British Council’s Cultural Leadership International operated in 18 countries during its brief existence (British Council 2015); the Clore Leadership Programme is a long term advisory partner on Hong Kong University’s Advanced Cultural Leadership Programme (Hoyle 2014b: 11) and UK researcher and consultant Sue Kay, a contributor to the 2010 Cultural Leadership Reader, is an advisor on Nätverkstan’s work towards a European Cultural Leadership Programme (http://europeanculturalleadership.org/project- partners/sue-kay/).

No such lineage is immediately apparent in relation to developments in Holland (http://leiderschapincultuur.nl/english/) and South Africa (http://www.afai.org.za/training-central-africa-update/#) although the emphasis on training for organisational leadership is similar. A new book on Asian artistic and cultural leadership, however, potentially diversifies the discourse by considering the models being applied to cultural development in the complex political conditions of some of the world’s fastest developing economies (Caust 2015). Different global understandings of what cultural leadership means and of its significance for cultural policy are therefore beginning to appear, although at present there seems to be no structured way in which the UK is able to learn reciprocal lessons from these different contexts except to the extent that there is involvement from Clore.27

26 Some of these have already been noted in section 1.1 above. Leadership in the Cultural Sector, Netherlands: http://leiderschapincultuur.nl/english/; African Cultural Leadership Programme: http://www.afai.org.za/training-central-africa-update/#; 27 The forthcoming IFACCA summit in Valletta, Malta (18-21 October 2016), titled At the crossroads? Cultural Leadership in the 21st Century offers one forum for such exchange, while also further demonstrating the growth of international concern with the topic (http://www.artsummit.org/programme/theme/). See also 6.3.2 below.

3.5 Deeper waters: the cultural policy context

3.5.1. The background to arts funding in Britain

While cultural leadership as a term and concept has emerged relatively recently, it takes its place in a much longer term history of arts policy and cultural development. Given that the original impetus for cultural leadership development stems from national concern for the well-being of key publicly funded institutions, it follows that the concept has an underlying political and perhaps moral relationship to the role of culture in public life. Tracing the longer term history of that role, and understanding its evolution, can shed light on the assumptions and power structures latent in cultural policy discourse, suggesting implications for cultural sector leadership. Alongside the political and institutional histories of writers such as Hewison (1995; 2014) and Sinclair (1995), Belfiore and Bennett’s (2007; 2008) analysis of the ‘positive’, ‘negative’ and ‘autonomy’ traditions in philosophical attitudes to the arts is used as a guide to the values imposed through the various interventions of governments and other policy makers.

Belfiore and Bennett chart a range of social and political responses to the arts through recurring arguments which can be traced back to Plato, in the case of the negative tradition (2007: 141), and Aristotle, in the case of the positive (ibid. 143). The negative tradition includes arguments that art can be socially dangerous or morally corrupting and takes forms ranging from the Puritan closure of the theatres in the 1640s to modern day film classification and censorship systems (2007: 147-8; 2008: 55). The positive tradition asserts that the arts are inherently psychologically, intellectually or ethically uplifting, which filters through the European Enlightenment to become a ‘Romantic faith in the civilising power of the arts’ (2007: 145). Instrumental uses of the arts in public policy can be seen as an extension of this tradition, producing social benefits through changes in behaviour (2008: 153). Meanwhile, the autonomy tradition – the art for art’s sake argument – rejects non-aesthetic considerations as irrelevant in judging or valuing the arts (2007: 145-7). Separating art from morality (or even elevating it above), it critiques instrumental approaches to cultural policy and denies that art needs to be justified in terms of its usefulness (ibid.). Any policy maker has to take a position in relation to these traditions as the basis for any intervention (or non- intervention), though it may be implied rather than explicit; the same applies to cultural sector leaders in negotiating their relationships to the public and to government.

Cultural leaders operating in organisational scenarios are therefore under frequent pressure to demonstrate a connection with the ‘positive’ tradition of cultural policy discourse and by doing so to reinforce the values associated with it. This has potential to create tension in relation to the more critical or socially challenging aspects of art practice. Pascal Gielen’s (2015b) sociology of art sheds further light on this from a European perspective and is explored further below (5.1).

Policy itself can perhaps be defined as a course of action based on principle – the attempt to bring about a desired outcome through a chosen route, where the value of the destination is judged in relation to the cost of the journey. Cultural leaders of any meaningful description are inevitably involved in either responding to or seeking to influence policy; their role is therefore inherently value-based, whether those values are explicitly stated, concealed or assumed. The values underpinning the structures of cultural development are revealed through its history.

In the UK, the modern history of culture as a matter for national government policy and regular public funding begins with the wartime Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) from which the Arts Council of Great Britain emerged in 1946. This gave structural form to state patronage of the arts for the first time. There had been government interventions in cultural projects before, as several writers have noted, going as far back as the Act of Parliament which established the British Museum in 1753 and continuing through the 19th century with the founding of the National Gallery (1824), the Victoria and Albert Museum (1852), the National Portrait Gallery (1856) and the Tate (1896) to house the ever-growing public collections in London (Hewison 1995: 31; Sinclair 1995: 15-17; Gordon & Stark 2010: 2.a.2). Beyond the capital, it became possible for new public institutions to be established through the levies allowed by the Museums Act of 1845 and the Public Libraries Acts of the 1850s, while the same decade saw the founding of the Department of Practical Art, which began the provision of state aid for art schools (Sinclair 1995: 17). In the 20th century, new technologies and cultural forms gave rise to BBC, brought into public ownership by a Royal Charter in 1927, and the British Film Institute, founded in 1933 as a response to Hollywood’s industrial dominance (Hewison 1995: 31). International rivalry also saw a British Committee for Relations with Other Countries (subsequently The British Council) established in 1934 to counter rising German and Italian propaganda through the medium of cultural diplomacy (Hewison 1995: 31; British

Council 2015). By 1940 it was therefore already well established in public discourse that culture could be educational, civilising, economically advantageous and a source of national pride as well as of aesthetic pleasure. CEMA’s mission, though, was to protect the nation’s established ‘high’ culture from wartime decay and hostility. This earlier impulse lies at the root of the Arts Council of Great Britain, despite its association with the post-war welfare settlement with which its foundation coincided (Hewison 1995: 29). Its first charter concentrated its mission on ‘the fine arts exclusively’ at the expense of the amateur and popular (ibid. 43).28 There is no straightforwardly democratic DNA to be found in the 70 year-old bones of Britain’s cultural funding system, despite the declarations of intent in relation to access that have appeared in more recent articulations of its remit (Arts Council England 2013, Creative Scotland 2014). It incorporates a foundational distinction between high and low culture which itself conjures, as Belfiore and Bennett (2008: 32-3) show, an opposition between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ influence – institutionalising a connection between aesthetic and moral judgement.

The Arts Council of Great Britain operated until 1994 when the Arts Council of England came into existence and the Arts Councils of Scotland and Wales became funded directly by the Scottish and Welsh Offices (Hewison 1995: 264). During the second half of the twentieth century its mission was continually reinterpreted amidst changing social and political contexts. The end-of-rationing optimism of the Festival of Britain in 1951 (Sinclair 1995: 78-9) gave way to a crisis of capital funding later in the decade (ibid. 104-5) and a period which the Arts Council’s then Drama Director experienced as ‘dispiriting’ as theatres closed and were sold off for redevelopment (Linklater 1995: 421-2). This atmosphere changed in the 1960s, particularly with the appointment of Jennie Lee as the country’s first Arts Minister led to the first government White Paper on the arts in February 1965 (Hewison 1995: 121). This led to an expansive period of cultural funding with the Arts Council newly empowered to make capital grants, paving the way for a new National Theatre building among other landmark projects (ibid. 141- 2). A 25% increase to the national arts budget in 1971-2 made possible greater resourcing of activities in the regions, although arguments opposing the spread of

28 Hewison points out that this phrase was inserted for the purposes of qualifying Arts Council premises for rate relief (in vain as it turned out), so the intention behind it may have been tactical more than elitist, but it remains a contributory part of the tension between excellence and access that was written into the cultural funding system at its earliest stages. The phrase was dropped in the charter renewal of 1967 (Hewison 1995: 43).

54 access to support for standards between leading figures in government and the Arts Council persisted (Sinclair 1995: 189). Societal developments were meanwhile recasting audiences as consumers, begging questions of the economic significance of cultural forms, including the high arts (Hewison 1995: 136). Such tendencies were deplored by contemporary cultural critics such as Raymond Williams, who saw the rise of consumerism contributing to an unbalancing of provision for social and individual needs, filling shop windows while library shelves went unstocked and pouring new cars onto ill-maintained roads (Williams 1965: 324). The consequences for the arts were to be found further down the line following the advent of the Thatcher government in 1979 with its belief in a free market economy and promotion of ‘the enterprise culture’ (Hewison 1995: 210).

The Arts Council was faced with real terms cuts in the early 1980s and was forced work out how to translate its activities into the government’s new language. In 1985 this was answered by A Great British Success Story (Arts Council of Great Britain 1985), a document replete with managerial and economic language (Sinclair 1995: 285). In this, as François Matarasso puts it, ‘they tried to present the arts as if they were presenting the annual report of a company’ (Matarasso 2013: 6). Tellingly, the subtitle of this ‘prospectus’ (Hewison 1995: 258) was ‘an invitation to the nation to invest in the arts’ (Arts Council of Great Britain 1985). This was followed up by John Myerscough’s report The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain, which also reframed arts subsidy as ‘investment’ in jobs and growth (Myerscough 1988: 150). This report ‘made a persuasive case for the implicit argument of its title’ (Hewison 1995: 276) and provided justification for local politicians in particular to employ cultural spending in urban renewal and civic rebranding (ibid. 278).

Local spending on culture therefore started to become increasingly important while the national budget stagnated. Demand from the Arts Council for ‘challenge’ or matched funding by local authorities for organisations in their areas was a further response to straitened circumstances (Hewison 1995: 255) with Regional Arts Association also playing a role in persuading local government to meet the subsidy gap (Sinclair 1995: 286). Experiments at the Greater London Council, though swiftly curtailed by the body’s abolition in 1986 (Hewison 1995: 241; Bell & Oakley 2015: 28), had produced fresh templates for social arts policy and cultural regeneration and further such efforts followed in places like Birmingham and Glasgow (Hewison 1995: 278-9). By the 1990s

55 these new agendas for public cultural policy were firmly established. New forms of language had also emerged within policy discourse to reflect the shift in values which had taken place in the process. The public purse might have become somewhat coy in the company of the arts, but its relationship with ‘creativity’ was another matter.

3.5.2. Cultural industries and the creativity agenda

The coinage of ‘cultural leadership’ depends in the first place on the assertion of a distinct, meaningfully unified ‘cultural sector’ as opposed to the professional separation of areas such as the arts, museums or libraries. It also needs to be defined in relation to other areas under the remit of a body such as the DCMS, particularly media, if the possible boundaries, definitions and tensions of ‘cultural leadership’ as a concept are to be clearly understood. The emergence in the policy arena of terms such as the ‘cultural industries’ and ‘creative industries’ is a significant part of the background to these relationships and its considerable literature reveals the different values at play behind the terminology.

As many writers have described, the term ‘cultural industry’ has its origin in the concept of the ‘culture industry’ developed at the end of the Second World War in the United States by Frankfurt school philosophers-in-exile Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Adorno & Horkheimer 1986; Garnham 2005; Hesmondhalgh 2007; O’Connor 2010; Bell & Oakley 2015). The term was coined pejoratively; an oxymoron intended to draw attention to the appropriation of culture by capitalism. The critique was not simply an elitist objection to lowered standards or the ‘barbarism’ of mass tastes (O’Connor 2010: 11), but a concern that crucial freedoms were being lost from both high and low forms in the process of commodification. Adorno later explained his view that:

The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational

constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control was not yet total. (Adorno 1991: 85)

The danger of the culture industry was that it diminishes art’s potential for social critique and the articulation of alternative worldviews: in Marxist terms, the revolutionary potential of aesthetic production was being removed. For Adorno, the critical role of art in society at all levels was at issue, and although the elitist and Marxist overtones of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique caused it to lose prominence for many years subsequently (Garnham 2005: 17), the fundamental question of its purpose in relation to capitalism has remained relevant, as Bell and Oakley (2015: 26) have acknowledged: ‘Adorno asked if there was any role for culture outside or beyond its role in economic production and hence in its profit making forms’. Adorno’s emphasis on the essential ‘rebellious resistance’ of the arts also calls to mind Graham Leicester’s (2010: 17) call for ‘creative transgression’ in cultural leadership. Despite these subtleties, the enduring terminological function of ‘culture industry’ has been to denote homogenised, mass produced cultural products imposed on the great majority of people by a profit-driven capitalist machine.

The ‘culture industry’ model underwent significant modification in subsequent decades, as industrial forms of production and capitalist investment approaches were increasingly applied to cultural forms during the 1960s and 1970s (Miège 1989). The unfolding of this process turned out to be far more ‘complex, ambivalent and contested’ than Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimistic critique had allowed (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 17), and called for a better understanding of both the ‘culture’ and ‘industry’ elements of the original term (Garnham 2005). The operation of complex processes of production and distribution in areas such as publishing, film, music and the media could not be adequately accounted for in simple terms of industrial control and passive consumption. In Britain, from the 1960s onwards, the new discipline of cultural studies began to investigate cultural behaviour in its anthropological dimension, finding that the consumption of ‘mass’ culture involved many processes of resistance and meaning- making, particularly through the selective appropriations of sub-cultures (Hall et al. 1976; Hebdige 1979). These developments began a rediscovery of ‘rebellious resistance’ under the conditions of the culture industry, albeit informed by a very different attitude to culture from that of Adorno. Indeed, Kellner (2001), reviewing the

57 development of British cultural studies, has argued that, while concentrating on the resistance inherent in popular cultural forms, the discipline neglected the potential of avant-garde or ‘high’ cultural resistance valued by the Frankfurt school, and that there is scope for better integration of the two approaches in relation to the critical potential of the arts.29 Be that as it may, conventional ideas of arts and cultural policies were confronted with a breakdown in consensus in terms of what they should be supporting, with the hegemony of ‘high art’ challenged by a proliferation of popular and alternative culture, while the technological developments fuelling cultural production also giving rise to new cultural forms and unforeseen creative possibilities (Hesmondhalgh 2007; Bell & Oakley 2015). In France, sociologists began to use the term ‘cultural industries’ to signal ‘an awareness of the problems of the industrialisation of culture, but a refusal to simplify assessment and explanation’ (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 17), moving the narrative beyond extreme cultural pessimism but without losing a sense of critique. Hesmondhalgh has noted how this construction was picked up by policy-makers at UNESCO from 1979 onwards (ibid. 16n), beginning the identification of the cultural industries as a legitimate area for political intervention.

The ‘seminal’ response at the level of policy was that of the Greater London Council (GLC) around 1983-86, which established a cultural industries strategy operating at all levels, from high to popular and from commercial to alternative, in the interests of cultural development and, subsequently, economic regeneration (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 139). This reflected a leftist cultural agenda which approved of intervention in the market but sought to democratise the forms supported in recognition of culture ‘as it was actually lived by most people’ rather than that represented by elite arts (Hewison 2014: 23). As a consequence of this shunning of elitism, it was – ironically - within the GLC’s socialist enclave that the language of enterprise took root in cultural policy discourse. The chair of the Council’s arts committee, Tony Banks (an MP from 1983), proudly distinguished its ‘investment’ from subsidy (Hewison 1995: 240), anticipating the terms later adopted by the Arts Council (1985) and Myerscough (1988) in their attempts to talk the government’s own language. The GLC’s strategic innovation,

29 Possibly Dick Hebdige hints at realising this potential in the classic Subcultures: the meaning of style, where he links the ‘bricolage’ approach of subcultural groups, in subversively adopting and juxtaposing contradictory cultural signifiers, with the theory of surrealist collage and its acts of semiotic aggression and disruption (see Hebdige 1979: 102-106); however, Kellner’s point is that avant-garde subversion itself was not seriously considered in the British cultural studies tradition and a potentially valuable theoretical connection with Frankfurt school aesthetic theory remained unexplored (Kellner 2001: 141- 2).

58 meanwhile, was to ‘harness the economic power of cultural consumption, while setting out a materialist challenge to the conventional Arts Council approach to what constituted culture and how it should be managed’ (Hewison 2014: 33). This involved positive engagement with the forms and structures (such as distribution channels) of ‘commercial’ culture so as to provide alternatives to it, breaking the barrier that had previously existed in policy between the commercial and subsidised sectors (Bell & Oakley 2015). The strategy built on recognition that modern cultural industries were characterised by high fixed production costs and low reproduction and distribution costs, thus favouring ‘large corporations with deep pockets who can employ economies of scale’ (Garnham 2005: 19). It therefore established a new connection between policy, culture and the economy. This happened to be founded on the basis of policy-based intervention in the market in the interests of a diversified cultural sector more reflective of the needs of the general population - but such an ordering of interests depended on the GLC’s particular political outlook. The cultural industries genie was out of the bottle, meaning that, subsequently, ‘the values of high culture were subjected to the low impulses of the market’ (Hewison 2014: 33), while, as Bell and Oakley have observed (2015: 28), ‘future developments of the cultural industries notion would have quite a different political complexion’.

By the time of the GLC’s closure, economic discourse was becoming established in arts advocacy via A Great British Success Story and The Economic Importance of the Arts in Britain in terms of supporting rather than challenging the government’s agenda. Myerscough made little use of the term ‘cultural industry’ except to differentiate the UK’s arts sector from media-inclusive European categorisations (Myerscough 1988: 35), but did talk about the ‘cultural leisure market’ (ibid. 12) and analysed spending on goods and services ranging from opera, theatre and museums to cinema, records, newspapers and TVs (ibid. 19-21). He calculated the value of the ‘arts’ sector across all these categories as equivalent to 1.28% of GDP while contributing the employment of almost 500,000 people (ibid. 35). A pattern was set whereby the aggregated economic value of a disparate set of culturally linked sub-sectors was harnessed to argue the case for subsidy – or investment – in the state-supported arts sector. Mysercough’s statistics have been questioned, along with whether his findings really provide a purely economic justification for investment in the traditional arts (Hewison 1995: 277). His methodology, however, is notable for identifying the ‘multiplier effect’ of ancillary spending by arts audiences and cultural tourists and can be seen as

59 contributing to the foundation of a new ‘discourse of culture-led urban renaissance’ (O’Connor 2010: 32).

The rise of the cultural industries as a feature of local cultural and regeneration strategies continued apace in the 1990s (Landry et al. 1996; Hesmondhalgh 2007: 140). Glasgow’s 1990 reign as European Capital of Culture broke new ground in using the award as a medium for the cultural transformation of a city’s image and economy, enhancing the case for such investment (Sinclair 1995: 322-3; Hewison 2014: 34). By the middle of the decade the idea of the ‘Creative City’ was emerging in public policy discourse (Landry & Bianchini 1995), though this new formulation aimed at addressing social problems through joined up cultural policy making as much as achieving economic development (Bell & Oakley 2015: 89). One of its principal architects, Comedia’s Charles Landry, later warned that creativity could only achieve its ‘cross- departmental’ potential for change if ‘embedded’ in a new civic mind-set ‘within which leadership is executed’ (Landry 2001: 116). At the same time, the yet more ambitious idea of a ‘Creative Nation’ was encountered by the new leader of Britain’s parliamentary Opposition, Tony Blair, when a visit to Australia saw him impressed with its Labour government’s growth-oriented policy of that name (Hewison 2014: 32). The approach to culture as an area of industrial policy was gaining political traction, and ‘creativity’ was now central to the developing discourse.

This linguistic shift towards creativity is emblematic of a process of ‘operational convergence’ between areas such as the media/information industries and the cultural/arts sector which had previously been seen as separate (Jeffcut 2001: 10). Such convergence is produced by professional overlaps, often through the opportunities provided by new technologies, and by policy connections between cultural departments, trade ministries, educational bodies and other stakeholders (ibid.). It is closely related to the ‘conceptual convergence’ which had allowed ideas of ‘culture’ and ‘industry’ to become compatible within policy discourse in the first place (ibid. 12-14). When Labour came to power in 1997 these formulations were inscribed in the policy of the new Department for Culture, Media and Sport under Blair’s first Secretary of State for Culture, Chris Smith. ‘Creative Britain’ was born (Smith 1998) and a Creative Industries Task Force was launched to map and evaluate the redefined sector in 1998, with a follow-up report produced towards the end of Smith’s tenure in 2001 (Cunningham 2001: 19-20). Like a lot of map-making processes, this effectively

60 brought into existence the territorial layout that it set out to chart, which comprised 13 categories ranging from crafts and the traditional arts to designer fashion and software – though strangely leaving out core cultural areas such as museums and heritage (ibid.).30 Despite the omissions the 1998 report left Myerscough’s decade-old analysis in its wake, swelling the sector to encompass 1.4 million jobs and claiming responsibility for 4% of GDP (Hewison 2014: 42). The 2001 version continued this expansive narrative, demonstrating a rate of growth for the creative industries twice that of the rest of the economy (ibid.).

The terms of cultural policy discourse had by now been transformed into those of an economic success story. This narrative was also taken up widely in other parts of the world, albeit with many different ‘creative industries’ definitions and groupings (Bell & Oakley 2015: 30-1). However, much as many in the cultural sector may have been pleased that their area of work was now being taken seriously by government, the shift from cultural to economic priorities was also a source of concern, particularly because economic measures were fast becoming the principal criteria of success (Banks & O’Connor 2009: 365-7). The aesthetic creativity of the arts had been displaced by a more general idea of creativity as innovation which could be applied to almost any industry. Concern for cultural content and the generation of symbolic meaning seemed to have been driven out of the very discourse on which public resources for the arts now depended, which began to alarm authors across the Anglophone world from the mid-2000s onwards (Caust 2003; Garnham 2005; Galloway & Dunlop 2006, 2007; Banks & O’Connor 2009). The new language was being used sloganistically, ‘unreflectively’, concealing the contradictions inherent in the opportunistic groupings which made up its categories (Garnham 2005: 16). On the one hand this looseness had a tactical function in advocacy for public funding whereby the cultural sector could ‘share in its relations with the government, and in policy presentation in the media, the unquestioned prestige that now attaches to the information society’ (ibid. 20). Chris Smith has been accused of exploiting such associations in his financially successful relationship with the Treasury (Belfiore 2009: 347-50). Broadly, three kinds of concern are raised in relation to this approach: that the evidence base for the economic benefits being claimed is unreliable (Belfiore 2009); that the ground is badly and inconsistently defined (Garnham 2005; Galloway & Dunlop 2007; Gielen 2013); that the values

30 The full list included: Advertising, Architecture, Arts and Antique Markets, Crafts, Design, Designer Fashion, Film, Interactive Leisure Software, Music, Television and Radio, Performing Arts, Publishing and Software (Cunningham 2001: 19-20).

61 according to which cultural policy is made are becoming skewed and the sector risks losing the ability to advocate for itself in ‘cultural’ terms (Caust 2003; Knell & Taylor 2011).

A further shift in terminology has taken place in recent years with the introduction of ‘creative economy’, which seems to be particularly popular with international agencies such as UNESCO (Bell & Oakley 2015: 31) and appears in the title of my interviewee Pablo Rossello’s team at the British Council. These terms – cultural industries, creative industries, creative economy – have produced different constituent sub- sectoral groupings and it is not always easy to find coherence. Software and computer services were included in the 1998 DCMS list but excluded by 2010 (Hewison 2014: 41-2). Museums were originally out (but are now in) while fashion has been consistently included in the UK definition. In France, however, museums are in while fashion is out (Bell & Oakley 2015: 30). Unless one of these particular definitions is specifically referred to it is not always possible to know, in conversation or even in policy literature, exactly which grouping is intended by casual references either to ‘cultural’ or ‘creative’ industries. Some attempts have been made to explain general usage by proposing models based on concentric circles, including one by London’s Work Foundation, developed in 2007 for the UK government and described by Hewison (2014: 44-5), and another by Australian cultural economist David Throsby (2010), which has been analysed by Bell & Oakley (2015: 32). Each of these put the creative arts at the core. The next circle represents the ‘cultural industries’, which support and commercialise expressive activity through production and distribution (e.g. publishing, recording and broadcasting); further out are ‘creative industries’, which combine expressive and functional values (e.g. fashion, architecture, advertising); beyond that is the wider economy, including services which might benefit from creative activities (as hotels and restaurants benefit from cultural events) and other industries that to some extent depend on creative skills such as design (Hewison 2014: 44; Bell & Oakey 2015: 32-3). Such models aim at articulating a ripple-effect relationship between artistic expression and economic growth, suggesting an investment-based justification for public subsidy, but they can be criticised for failing to account for the ‘non-commercial’ and educational priorities of the arts (Hewison 2014: 44-5), and for overstretching the meaning of the word ‘creative’ in the outer sectors (Bell & Oakley 2015: 33).

Despite these problems and inconsistencies, the general trend of development in the terminology shows the real object of policy, particularly in the UK but also internationally, moving ‘away from concern with cultural and artistic production and consumption and more towards generalised innovation policy’ (Bell & Oakley 2015: 33). Within creative economy discourse, then, ‘cultural’ content becomes optional. For Bell and Oakley, this ‘reopens the gap between “culture” and “the economy” that cultural industries advocates were trying to close from the 1980s onwards’ (ibid.). According to this logic, culture becomes important only to the extent that it is commercially exploitable and any kind of ‘oppositional stance’ or socially critical role ‘is firmly resisted’ (ibid.). These linguistic shifts therefore have great significance for how cultural activity and its values are defined in national and international policy. If artists and cultural managers are not literate with these meanings, and able sometimes to challenge their implied values, they risk supporting or repeating formulations from which their own work and priorities may be substantially excluded.

3.5.3. Values and identity in cultural policy and leadership

The aftermath of the global financial crisis has intensified questions about the basis for public subsidy for cultural activities. Questions of sustainability and value have been raised in various reports and enquiries in the UK (Gordon & Stark 2010; Knell & Taylor 2011; Stark, Powell & Gordon 2013, 2014a, 2014b; Warwick Commission 2015) and in wider calls to re-ground culture in response to the new political and economic contexts (Banks & O’Connor 2009; Gielen 2015a). The continuing discourse of cultural leadership now takes place against a very different backdrop to that of its emergence in 2002, but the elements that relate to value can be seen as continuing to address the ‘crisis of legitimacy’ which John Holden (2006) diagnosed before the financial crash. These topics were investigated by the Demos conference ‘Valuing Culture’ as far back as 2003, leading to a think piece by then Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell about how the value of culture could be translated to government through more authentic means than ‘targets’, as well as to Holden’s related conceptualisation of ‘cultural value’ as a revised basis for the public funding system (Holden 2004: 9-10). Holden subsequently called for a less introverted cultural sector and stronger engagement with the public (2006: 52-3) as well as visible involvement in culture by politicians as a form of

63 leadership (ibid. 58-9), showing an understanding of culture in which crucial leadership needs to be forthcoming from outside the confines of the professional sector. Some more recent tendencies in art practice and literature seem to respond to these moral and political challenges, with concern among artists and writers for new forms of social engagement and participation debated nationally and internationally (Hope 2011; Jackson 2011; Kester 2013; Mesch 2013; Nicoll 2014; Rooke 2014). These developments suggest that artists are increasingly pitched into social or public realm leadership scenarios (see 3.4.2 above) and challenged to work beyond the boundaries of established sectoral practices and institutions. The work that they create is unavoidably connected to local power relations, particularly in terms of how it is resourced, and is therefore ethically implicated in the political conditions within which it is produced (Price 2015).

In built tensions between ‘access’ and ‘excellence’ have pervaded the various historical Arts Council structures, as several writers have noted (Hewison 1995; Sinclair 1995; Jancovich 2011), while the injustices and contradictions of lottery fund spending on the arts, where poorer areas are often substantial net contributors and wealthy areas net beneficiaries, have become increasingly uncomfortable political issues, especially as the proportion of lottery money in the overall funding system has increased (Stark, Powell & Gordon 2014a). Different incarnations of the national funding bodies, from the original Arts Council of Great Britain to the separate institutions for England, Wales and Scotland now operating, along with their relationships to various regional arts boards, development agencies and consortia, have reflected the changing balance between centralised authority and regional representation in public policy (Bell & Oakley 2015). Each of these constructions represents a particular ordering of priorities and as such constitutes an incarnation of leadership in the field of cultural value despite the fact that it may be difficult to disaggregate the influence of individual sectoral leaders from the overall process.

National devolution in particular has created potential for culture and cultural discourse to develop distinct variations: Janet Archer, Chief Executive of Creative Scotland, notes, for example, that making sense of policy ‘is easier in a small connected nation which already has devolved responsibility for culture … Culture is a larger percentage of the Scottish Government’s remit than it is in the wider UK’ (Archer 2014a: 194); however, the partial nature of devolved remits, particularly in relation to broadcasting

64 and tax incentives, also points up the complexity of creating an integrated cultural policy (Bonnar 2014). Some developments, such as the strengthening of Gaelic and traditional arts, are clearly connected to direct intervention, to the extent that it is claimed that ‘the traditional arts community only emerged in the 1990s within the cultural policy discourse’ (McKerrell 2014: 162). Others, such as an apparent rejection of the ‘creative industries’ agenda within the Scottish arts community, have appeared more or less as side effects of structural changes and controversies (Schlesinger 2009; Bonnar 2014). Naturally caught up as signifiers of identity in debates about Scottish independence, art and culture have also presented opportunities for Scottish politicians to contrast Holyrood and Westminster approaches, as for example achieved by Scottish Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop in a well-received speech during 2013 which rejected recent UK government insistence that the economic case for culture needed to be remade (Hyslop 2013; McMillan 2013; Bonnar 2014).

Such issues set the terms in which culture is and can be discussed and inevitably shape the discourse. The narratives constructed through these arguments make claims for how culture is owned and how identity is projected through it. These issues are intensely political and unavoidable in cultural practice. They shape from the outside the sphere of action in which artists and other cultural professionals operate; even if they do not affect the circumstances of production they colour the conditions of reception. They may not be the subject of an artist’s work or the direct operational concern of an organisation, but must be taken into account by any conception of cultural leadership that aims at autonomous direction finding, wishes to protect itself from co-option, or hopes to act with understanding of its interactions.

3.6 Theories and concepts of leadership

There is a vast literature on the subject of leadership in general and business leadership in particular, much of which is beyond the scope of this thesis.31 However,

31 In 2003 Keith Grint (2005: 15) noted that in two months from October to December the number of items on ‘leadership’ available on Amazon had increased by 3% to 14,610. He speculated that at this rate there could be 45,000 by 2010 and (obviously ridiculous) 100,000 by 2015. In fact, on 30th November 2015 there were 228,792 such items. Fascination with leadership never ceases to expand but the subject seems unlikely to gain correspondingly in coherence.

65 it is essential to outline some of the key concepts from business leadership which have been imported into cultural leadership discourse, and to consider the possible definitions of leadership in this context. This research acknowledges the basic typology of business leadership (transactional, transformational and relational) outlined by Hewison (2004: 163) as a foundation for thinking about cultural leadership. It refers for definitions to some key texts in which these ideas are laid out (Bass 1990; Cooren & Fairhurst 2003; Marturano & Gosling 2008) but also draws on critique and deconstructive accounts of leadership theory which question certain assumptions of the discourse (Grint 2005; Morris et al. 2005; Alvesson & Spicer 2011; Tourish 2011) as well as specific applications of such theory to the cultural sector (Kay & Venner 2010).

Leadership in one form or another has been a concern of philosophers and political advisors since classical times. Socrates can be found advising authoritarian leaders of the dangers of dissent (Tourish 2011: 225), while Hannah Arendt (1998: 222) points to Plato as responsible for separating ‘mastership’ from the integrated concept of action, as discussed above (2.2.3). Each is concerned with ‘who should rule us’, and how (Grint 2005: 6). However, such concerns tended to be confined to ideas of political, aristocratic or military authority until relatively recent times but gradually begin to be applied to industrial settings in the early part of the 19th century. Some possible connections between the concept of leadership and the development of ‘reason’ as a better justification for authority than birth or position are discussed in more detail below (5.1.1). In any case, the application of theory, technique and training to modern forms of business leadership was so well established by the mid-1970s that it was already possible to joke that definitions of leadership were nearly as numerous as those trying to define it (Stogdill 1974: 7, referenced in Grint 2005: 16).

Alvesson and Spicer (2011) describe a progression in early leadership research from ‘trait’ approaches to ‘style’ and ‘contingency’ theories. Trait theory looked for the innate qualities of individuals that allowed them to become leaders (ibid. 13). Research into style sought to identify distinctive leadership behaviours rather than assuming that only certain personalities could lead, while, from the late 1960s, contingency models took into account the different contexts into which particular styles could be effective (ibid. 14). Each of these approaches identifies leadership specifically with the individual leader, whether concentrating on their in-born

66 characteristics or learned and applied techniques. The early 1980s saw the rise of a strongly charisma-based model with visionary, energetic leaders expected to inspire loyalty and enthusiasm in corporate cultures (ibid. 14-15). In many ways the 19th century ideal of the ‘hero’, celebrated by writers like Carlyle (1892), was still very much present. The development of ‘transformational’ leadership reduced the emphasis on charisma while developing the ideal of communicating vision and building commitment (Alvesson & Spicer 2011: 15). Proponents emphasised the contrast with ‘transactional’ leadership, through which results are obtained more directly through the incentives of reward or punishment (Bass 1990). Transactional leadership is interpreted as appropriate for managing fixed or repetitive tasks whereas transformational style is seen relevant to value-based scenarios and situations of change, and therefore having some appeal to the cultural sector (Hewison 2004: 163; Burns & Wilson 2010: 92). However, the emphasis on transformation involves a rather dubious faith in the leader alone as having the power to change others and produce great solutions from unpromising situations. When held by the individual this belief can lead to narcissism and a lack of self-awareness. When such individuals are sought by employers the appetite for a big-talking miracle worker can override sober assessment of actual qualifications and real organisational need (Alvesson & Spicer 2011: 16). Transformational, charismatic and heroic forms of leadership remain closely related and overlapping.

Developments in ‘post-heroic’ models of leadership have sought to address some of these problems and to recognise other forms of effective organisational relationship (ibid. 17). Numerous versions are available with authors emphasising variously: ‘emotional intelligence’ (Burns & Wilson 2010: 92); ‘humility’ (Morris et al. 2005); ‘distributed leadership’ (Grint 2005: 142-5) and ‘relational’ or ‘reflexive’ leadership (Tourish et al. 2010).32 There are important differences between these but, as their titles imply, each aims at decoupling the concept of leadership from exclusive identification with the individual leader and importing greater self-awareness and critique into practice. Some authors attempt to retrieve the role of ‘followers’ as an important part of how leadership functions, denying the ‘heroic’ assumption of their

32 ‘Distributed’ leadership is also referred to as ‘Distributive’ leadership by Grint (2005: 8) with the two terms appearing as interchangeable (‘Distributive’ is used in his introduction to signpost to a later chapter in which ‘Distributed’ is used throughout). This is characterised as a bottom-up phenomenon where leadership emerges in a dispersed way across an organisation or network. It is distinct from delegated leadership, where responsibility is allocated within a hierarchy (ibid. 142-3). The term ‘Distributive Leadership’ is used by two of the research interviewees (see 4.2 and 4.2.3 below).

67 passivity (Grint 2005: 36; Tourish et al. 2010: S45). All of these approaches look more closely at the importance of relationships, not just from the point of view of the leader’s outward communication skills but in terms of how action is produced through the processes and often unforeseen consequences of relational dynamics. Several useful insights can be drawn from these perspectives for the analysis of leadership discourse. Grint, building on this socially constructed understanding of leadership, divides the concept into four elements: person, result, position and process (2005: 5), arguing that all are relevant to a rounded understanding of the concept but that existing approaches, whether in theory or practice, tend to over-emphasise one or other aspect. Alvesson and Spicer (2011) and their contributors explore the metaphors through which leaders act and understand their practice. Cooren and Fairhurst (2003), meanwhile, outline the ways in which leaders act as storytellers and translators between different organisational settings, seeking to establish influence through the management of meaning. These ideas inform my understanding of the models and descriptions of leadership encountered both in the literature and the research interviews.

3.7 New stages for cultural leadership

The concept of cultural leadership as developed in the discourse of UK cultural policy was born out of a sense of crisis at a particular time and forms part of a response to concerns about managerial and financial failure in established organisations. It can be seen to emerge at exactly the same time that investment in the cultural sector increases under New Labour, when political belief in the economic and social potential of the cultural and creative sectors was at its high water mark, while at the same time an increasingly managerialist approach to performance management suggested anxiety about how the results could be proved. As early as 2000 the DCMS under Chris Smith was criticised for ‘over-management’ and collecting ‘too many unnecessary statistics’ (Hewison 2014: 94). The corresponding growth of emphasis on cultural leadership can therefore be read negatively as an anxiety about the sector’s capacity to be trusted with money which is given urgency by the increasing amounts of money flowing into its organisations. It relates at best indirectly to the wider potential discourses concerned with artists leading the development of their art forms or with the

68 shaping of taste and sensibility in the public realm (Corn 1998; Douglas & Fremantle 2009).

The UK continued to bang the creativity drum to the end of the New Labour period. A further DCMS strategy, Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy, appeared in 2008 (Hewison 2014: 45), and an ill-fated cultural manifesto, still employing the title ‘Creative Britain’, was produced as part of Labour’s 2010 general election campaign (ibid. 160). By this time, the global financial storm had dampened the agenda and the arts were soon back to crisis stations, reaching for new arguments to ensure their survival (Knell & Taylor 2011). The trajectory of cultural leadership development changed following the financial crisis and the subsequent replacement of Gordon Brown’s Labour government with the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition from 2010. The Cultural Leadership Programme, to which Brown had given his Chancellor’s blessing and a £12m initial investment in 2006 (Arts Council England 2006), was closed in March 2011.33 Not only the level of expenditure but also its objectives were now the subject of criticism. Gordon and Stark, contrasting Shaw’s early efforts on behalf of arts administrators with the ‘millions of pounds’ being spent on developing ‘hundreds’ of cultural leaders by the end of the New Labour period, reminded the next government that ‘the early years of the Clore Foundation’s interest in the field focused on succession planning for a small number of the most senior posts nationally’ and noted with disapproval the ‘massive growth in middle management posts in the public cultural sector’ and ‘the hubris of “cultural leadership”’ – especially at a time of imminent cuts and redundancies (Gordon & Stark 2010).

According to this view, the country had progressed in less than a decade from not having enough cultural leadership to developing too much, and of the wrong type. Arts Council England strove to replace the Cultural Leadership Programme by commissioning the Developing Resilient Leadership initiative (Arts Council England 2012), a £1.8m scheme for which the Clore Leadership Programme was selected as national delivery partner. This funding was allocated for the period February 2013- March 2016 and its purpose “is to support the personal and professional development of cultural leaders. It aims to foster a strong national network of individuals who work

33 The closure is acknowledged at http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/what-we-do/arts-council- initiatives/past-initiatives/the-cultural-leadership-programme/ [accessed 3rd August 2015]. By that time the total investment had risen to £22m, according to Hewison (2014: 243 note 11).

69 collaboratively for more resilient cultural organisations and deeper local engagement” (Arts Council England 2012: 4).

A few things can be concluded from these developments: on the one hand that, even by 2012, ACE still considered cultural leadership worthy of long term strategic investment, despite its severe financial pressures; but on the other, that the consensus for development of cultural leadership had broken down. Moreover, the word “resilient” in the title of the new programme itself speaks of more embattled times, and demonstrates how the requirements of leadership were now being rethought for a new era. The language of resilience begins to appear on a regular basis in cultural policy and sectoral strategy documents around this time, across Britain and abroad. The term makes an early appearance in David Jubb’s foreword to the Cultural Leadership Reader, written at the time of transition to the Coalition government in the UK, which identified the sector’s challenge of finding ‘new ways of being resilient with what we have’ (Kay & Venner 2010: 3). By 2012, an ‘Art of Resilience’ conference was hosted by the Art & Communication festival in Riga as a way of responding to ‘unstable, uncertain times’ (Cultura 21: 2012); the following June, the Association of Independent Museums in the UK held its annual conference with the subtitle ‘Improving Resilience in Economically Challenging Times’ (Association of Independent Museums 2013); while a 2013 description by Creative Scotland of its Cultural Economy programme stated the aim of building ‘long-term organisational resilience and financial sustainability’ (Creative Scotland 2013). Resilience had arrived as a value in cultural management in a way that was never detectable in the literature prior to the financial crisis. It suggests a concern with survival, with continuity – similar language in fact to that which had brought the ‘crisis’ of cultural leadership to the fore ten years earlier - but now commonly articulated from within the sector itself and in response not to a perception of poor management but to the external threat of adverse economic circumstances and changing political times.

The first chapter of cultural leadership’s short history had abruptly closed, and the discourse was beginning to shift. Meanwhile, Clore’s central role in the Developing Resilient Leadership initiative can also be seen to consolidate its status as the UK’s pre-eminent cultural leadership training provider, taking over the legacy programme of the public sector’s former parallel initiative – for which, as Hewison points out, it had in any case already been a provider of short courses (Hewison 2014: 128). This is not to

70 criticise either the Clore programme itself or the decision by ACE to select them for this work, but it does demonstrate an overall shrinking of the field and highlights the limited range of voices active in the ongoing discourse of cultural leadership in national policy. Clore’s own commissioned research has identified this constriction, with TBR’s report into the changing needs and provision for cultural leadership training in December 2013 noting that ’relatively few’ of the many management and leadership courses now available specifically targeted the cultural sector, and that, despite the existence of a few in house courses from major cultural institutions and professional bodies, the Clore Leadership Programme ‘remains the primary sector-based provider of leadership development’ (TBR 2013: 12).34

Unsurprisingly, the report finds that in the new economic climate ‘the predominant concern in the sector is how to respond to the reduction in public funding’, warning of potential ‘tunnel vision’ in this regard and calling for ‘a breadth of perspective’ from leaders and within leadership training (TBR 2013: 4). It also reports considerable continued demand for specialist training. One thing that emerges clearly is that, at least within this constituency, the need for different organisational structures and delivery models as well as the constant change and innovation in digital and technical spheres are creating pressure on cultural sector leaders to develop new knowledge and keep pace with developments. This perhaps accounts for the continued large scale demand for specialist training that the report identifies (ibid. 4). The diversity of governance structures, funding models and types of organisations – even within the subsidised arts sector, let along the wider cultural and creative industries – mean that ‘a complex, varied and dynamic approach to leadership development is both critical and essential to meet the various elements of the sector’s leadership requirements’ (ibid. 6).

The themes and disciplines involved in the research are not always clearly bounded and inevitably overlap. The point, however, is not to separate the categories but to relate them. The ‘order of discourse’ of cultural leadership (Jørgensen & Phillips 2002: 56) can be seen to be made up of a range of competing and overlapping discourses

34 This research was itself the first product of the Developing Resilient Leadership funding, further reflecting the sense of times changing as Clore sought to review its understanding of the sector’s demand for leadership development as well as the available offer. It is based on 589 survey responses from cultural sector professionals supported by a number of in depth interviews.

71 representing very different values.35 These include socially oriented discourses of cultural identity and participation and the contrasting economically focused creative industries discourse. Older narratives from both the positive and negative traditions of the arts sit in relationship to newer concerns about training, business management and different conceptions of leadership. Further relationships will be identified with the empirical data of the research interviews in the chapters that follow.

35 The concept of the ‘order of discourse’ is outlined in 2.2.1 above.

Chapter 4: The experience of cultural leadership

Analysis of research interviews

4.1. Range and purpose of research interviews

This chapter begins with a consideration of the definitions of leadership and cultural leadership referred to within the interviews, moving on to some of the ways in which particular uses or problems of language affect individuals, organisations and the cultural sector as a whole. A number of key themes are identified among the texts, several of which respond clearly to those already evident in the literature, including issues of value, resilience, the international dimensions of cultural leadership and relationships to cultural policy. The analysis then considers responses relevant to each of the three spheres of action of the Artist as Leader: the aesthetic, the organisational and the public sphere (Douglas & Fremantle 2009). It looks at how interviewees interpret their relationships with each of these areas and how other influences and developments shape the circumstances of cultural and artistic development. The chapter concludes with reflections on the provision of training, the area on which direct intervention within policy around cultural leadership has focused for over a decade.

My approach in working with these texts has been to draw themes from repeated readings, allowing both correspondences and contradictions of language, opinion and context to emerge. Each interviewee was aware of the nature of the research and the general terms of the enquiry. I have therefore not been too concerned with the prevalence or frequency of particular terms and phrases because I am aware of my own role in importing key language into the conversations. However, the analysis does include some particular attention to language use where it seems valuable in relation to discursive formations already identified in the literature. In the main I have been listening out for voices intersecting and overlapping so as to construct a woven narrative from experience in relation to the key concerns of the research. To some

73 extent the combined texts are conceived as a two year conversation in a very large room. I have tried to work out my own thoughts by listening to it.

4.2. The cultural uses of leadership

… this is another one of these cultural terms where you could basically make your own meaning, because they are very general. What’s more general than the word culture? And leadership? (Rossello 2014: 2)

The British Council’s Creative Economy team manager, Pablo Rossello, has an academic background in philosophy, and professes himself surprised at how easily ‘cultural leadership’ has gained acceptance, not to mention investment, from people who have ‘no shared understanding of this term whatsoever’ (ibid. 8). It’s much less surprising, then, that these questions of meaning appear consistently at the heart of the research interviews. Cultural leadership is a compound term constructed from two individually contested terms, and in the absence of an authoritative definition, individuals reflecting on the subject almost unavoidably find themselves setting out its parameters in their own terms. These observations divide between outlines of leadership in general, efforts to define cultural leadership as a specific area of work, and reflections on their own personal or company style of leadership. None of the interviewees were directly asked to describe or assess their preferred styles, but it is noticeable that several of them referred to their own practice when trying to identify the possible distinctiveness of ‘cultural’ leadership as opposed to leadership in general. Most of the theoretical terms used – ‘distributive’, ‘transformational’, ‘transactional’, ‘facilitative’, ‘relational’ – appear in these attempts at self-description. There was less engagement with detailed definitions of ‘culture’ or ‘the cultural sector’. The Clore Leadership Programme’s Sue Hoyle (2014b: 2) was keen to emphasise adoption of a broad based definition of culture ‘that goes from archaeology through to digital. That would include museums, libraries, performing arts, visual arts, street arts – the whole range of creative and cultural activity. Without formal boundaries.’ She is reluctant to pin things down further ‘because the nature of creative expression is constantly evolving’ acknowledging that, within the programme, ‘there are aspects and areas of

74 the creative industries and digital activity that we are less engaged with than some of the longer standing forms of cultural expression’ (ibid.). The dynamic, evolving nature of cultural activity produces understandable wariness, and sometimes weariness, when it comes to suggesting rigid definitions. For public sector manager Cluny Macpherson (Leeds City Council) it’s enough that ‘people understand broadly what, kind of, arts and creativity is, and I’m not that interested in arguing on the head of a pin which bits are in and which bits are out’ (Macpherson 2014: 2). Within most people’s day jobs it may not be necessary, productive or even practical to do so, but this does leave some conceptual looseness around the idea of what kind of culture it is to which ‘cultural leadership’ specifically relates.

4.2.1. Conceptions of leadership

Two main themes are apparent in interviewees’ overall definitions of leadership: its orientation to the future, and its necessary relationship to other people. Leadership is very clearly understood to be something that goes beyond managerial competence, as Arnaud Pasquali (2014: 8) summarises: ‘a leader has probably a more long term vision. A manager would implement this vision’. For Hoyle, these two themes are entwined: ‘a leader is a change maker. Leaders are people who inspire and engage others to work with them and to bring about change’ (Hoyle 2014b: 2). This includes marshalling human as well as financial resources, but it is not necessarily about occupying particular positions in hierarchies: ‘it doesn’t necessarily have to be someone who is working within the organisation, and it certainly doesn’t have to be someone who’s at the top of the organisation’ (ibid.). Such an outlook is echoed by Jane Spiers of Aberdeen Performing Arts (2014: 5), who oversees around 300 staff members at peak times: ‘it doesn’t matter whether it’s cultural leadership or any leadership… You have to build a team of leaders… it’s about cascading leadership and responsibility through the company’. This is a strong articulation of the principles of transformational leadership in which the hierarchical leader develops leadership capacity at all levels beneath them (Bass 1990). Clearly this assumes a senior executive responsibility for ensuring that the appropriate company culture exists in the first place. Janet Archer (Creative Scotland) uses a choreographic metaphor to explain how this can be achieved:

… as a leader, you have to understand that your relationship with different people in your team will be slightly different, and you have to respond to them. In the same way that a choreographer will respond to the talent that comes through from the individual interpreter - dancer - you keep nuancing how you react to them, until you see the best coming out of them. (Archer 2014b: 9-10)

Archer discusses modern choreography as a practice which no longer involves dictating the steps but instead employs a process of improvising and editing to co- create the work. This is obviously a specifically cultural metaphor, but it is applied to the concept of organisational leadership in general rather than cultural leadership in particular. It is essentially a rejection of ‘transactional’ (Bass 1990) or ‘commander’ (Alvesson & Spicer 2011) forms of leadership which fail to manage or respond to the human potential of an organisation or process. Hoyle also distances herself from these, commenting that ‘there are still some models of leadership that are perhaps about the past rather than about the future’, identifying instead with ‘people who know themselves but also who build relationships’, exemplifying the ‘collaborative or generative approach to leadership’ (Hoyle 2014b: 9).

Another metaphor for leadership that emerges strongly from the interviews is that of navigation or direction finding. Hoyle’s interview shows that as far as she is concerned this is no casual coinage. Referring to the involvement of the Clore Leadership Programme in the development of cultural leadership education at Hong Kong University, she describes a process led there by Professor Daniel Chua on the meaning of leadership in that cultural context. In Mandarin and Cantonese, ‘when people say the word for leader it tends to mean dictator’ (Hoyle 2014b: 16). In Hoyle’s account, Chua found that the more appropriate word in both languages was that meaning ‘navigator’, which ‘gave a better sense of the kind of leadership we’re trying to promote’ (ibid.). Pablo Rossello also refers directly to international contexts when describing a cultural leader as ‘someone who can navigate’ in order to direct change ‘at a policy and a technological and a social level’ (Rossello 2014: 5). These descriptions recall a metaphor used by James Marriott (Platform) during the Artist as Leader interviews conducted by Douglas and Fremantle in 2008. Asserting that the key process ‘is not so much leading as direction-finding’, Marriott imagines a wheel

76 turning, which on one level ‘just repeats itself’, reproducing cycles of activity, but noting that ‘at the same time, if the wheel turns, then it moves across a landscape’ (Marriott 2008: recording at 12m 25s). Management, perhaps, is the process through which the wheel is kept turning, while leadership is the process of navigation, seeking a destination and dealing with the vagaries of the landscape. Revisiting this image during my interview with Marriott in 2013, we discussed the distinction between the mechanical task of keeping the wheel turning and the dynamic task of navigation, particularly in the context of a changed economic and political landscape. For Marriott, this is the dimension in which leadership operates: ‘the question to me is what kind of a vehicle do we need for the landscape we’re in now … the landscape has fundamentally shifted since we did the Artist as Leader’ (Marriott 2013: 11).

Even within the general descriptions of leadership found in the interviews, there are hints that the need for leadership in the cultural sector is driven by its characteristic pressures and uncertainties, which make the ability to engage effectively with the future particularly desirable. Andrew Ormston relates the need for direction finding to the prevalence of short term funding:

... one of the big issues about being effective, is actually making sure you’re doing things which have a sense of direction, longer term purpose, that you can see where it’s heading, that you can see how the next thing might happen around it (Ormston 2014: 3)

Going back again to the Artist as Leader interviews, this can be related to a definition of leadership articulated by Roanne Dods:

Leadership is having a sense of mission or a clarity of what you want to do even though you might not know what it looks like, and having the ability to … follow through to that truth – and bringing other people with you on that journey (Dods 2008: recording from 11m 22s)

Both formulations acknowledge the unpredictability of the future, valuing the ability to keep a fundamental sense of purpose intact while proceeding into that unknown. For Dods, as with Hoyle and Archer, it is the relationship with other people through which

77 this ability becomes leadership. This does not necessarily make it some kind of mystical or God-given attribute. Spiers asserts that ‘I don’t believe people are born leaders… leadership to me is just another function or attribute of a job description than everybody needs to have’ (Spiers 2014: 14). She relates workplace leadership to practical tasks and how people relate to colleagues in going about them. Whether or not there is anything particularly special about cultural leadership is a separate debate.

4.2.2. Definitions of cultural leadership

When asked to define or locate cultural leadership as a more specific concept, the interviews in this research show little deviation from the standard construction found in the literature that cultural leadership is something that operates internally within the cultural sector. Despite the linguistic imprecision of the term as identified by Rossello, there is surprising level of assumed understanding and apparent consensus. As Rossello has further noted: ‘I struggled with the term at the beginning because it meant nothing. And I sort of always expected people to have the same reaction. But I’ve been surprised by how many people assume… “oh yeah, I can understand that”’ (Rossello 2014: 10). This willingness of people to rally to such a vaguely defined term has been noted in Alvesson and Spicer’s critique of mainstream leadership discourse, where ‘far from detracting the vast range of potential consumers from the topic, the ambiguity of leadership seems to have actually whetted their appetite’ (Alvesson & Spicer 2011: 195). Adding ‘culture’ to the concept may only add to the extent to which people can project their own meanings onto the term, while at the same time making it sound more specific, contributing to the impression of a shared frame of reference.

Some of this assumed consensus can be traced more concretely in the cultural sector to a degree of familiarity with the origins and purpose of cultural leadership training and a wide experience of similar initiatives. This is evident not only through Clore (where Sharon Watson had been a Fellow) or Cultural Leadership International (operated by Rossello), but also through schemes such as Leadership Advance (an Arts Council England funded course attended by Watson as a trainee); International Creative Entrepreneurs (on which Suzy Glass has been a facilitator); New Music Plus (a Performing Right Society professional development programme attended by Glass);

Scottish Enterprise ‘Learning Journeys’ (accessed by Spiers on behalf of APA’s Director of Marketing). Julie Ward (2014: 9) also refers to taking part in an unspecified ‘cultural leadership programme in the north-west that was about collaborative leadership’. The Clore Leadership Programme itself had trained 284 Fellows by 2014 and over 1000 had attended its short courses (Hoyle 2014b: 8), while the Cultural Leadership Programme is claimed to have reached over 20,000 professionals between 2006-11 (Arts Council England 2015a). 14,000 of those had attended events in its first two years of operation, at which point the programme’s evaluators estimated that one in eight leaders in the sector had been reached in some way (DTZ 2008). Whatever quality or depth of training may have been offered, the reach of these programmes as vehicles of cultural leadership has been extensive. Rossello, who had a copy of the Cultural Leadership Reader to hand during his interview and made several specific references to it, demonstrates explicit awareness of the early 2000s policy history of cultural leadership and its literature, and this grounds his definition:

A cultural leader meant a highly entrepreneurial senior manager, cultural manager… Capable of addressing business development issues within large, expensive organisations - public cultural organisations in the UK. (Rossello 2014: 5)

Such a senior manager as Jane Spiers, running an organisation with a £10m annual turnover, is able to identify quite closely with these core attributes of high level business management: ‘in terms of cultural leadership, people who run companies, who run venues… we have all the skills that are required to run any business. They’re transferable skills’ (Spiers 2014: 17). However, the adequacy of this original conception to deal with the range and nature of an evolving sector is doubted by Roanne Dods, who has worked extensively in recent years on the development of creative micro-enterprises through the annual Small is Beautiful conference.36 In her view, ‘organisational leadership and cultural leadership tend to still focus on very particular kinds of entrepreneurial, heroic leadership type models’ (Dods 2014: 2), masking unhelpfully traditional forms of thinking behind creative language and associations.

36 www.smallisb.com (the conference is named after E.P. Schumacher’s 1973 book challenging the orthodoxies of Western economic structures).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sue Hoyle is another to make reference to the formative literature of cultural leadership, quoting Hewison and Holden’s (2002) Clore Duffield report, but she is also keen to emphasise a continual broadening within the Clore programme of the conception of leadership at play:

… the 2002 report made it quite clear that leadership was something that happens at all levels, even within organisations, and that seeing it through people, the programme would recognise that leadership happens both within and outside of organisations ... the definition of what a cultural leader is, and how you can be a leader, has broadened in all our eyes, and I think it has both influenced and reflected the changes that are happening now. (Hoyle 2014b: 4)

Hoyle also asserts the inherent diversity within this category of leaders while also stressing the future-focussed orientation that was a feature of the interviewees’ general definitions of leadership: ‘the leaders of culture are incredibly varied and technically different, but they are people who are looking to the future. Perhaps looking towards forms of culture that we can’t yet imagine’ (ibid. 2). This emphasis is reflected by Rossello in recalling how the British Council’s Cultural Leadership International programme looked to develop its understanding of leadership beyond the original emphasis on organisations: ‘we changed the focus from this very UK led agenda to thinking, ok, leadership means that you are essentially trying to drive or direct the changes, or the movement of the cultural sector as a whole’ (Rossello 2014: 4). However, Rossello also considers that cultural leadership has lost some of this original meaning over time, becoming ‘a victim of its own success’ during the period of rising investment which resulted in the CLP and CLI programmes (ibid. 5). The gradual expansion of the applicable definition of cultural leadership appears in this narrative as a loss of focus.

Other interviewees suggest that cultural leadership occurs when the ability to engage with change is combined with a kind of unselfishness, a willingness to act in the wider interests of cultural or sectoral development. This is an interesting expansion of the original definition as it finds a role for leadership which transcends immediate organisational contexts or individual job roles, a sense of personal commitment, which community artist Emma Tregidden (2014: 10) describes as ‘vocational’. For Julie

Ward, cultural leadership involves a belief that ‘the sector requires visionaries who can keep dreaming about solutions… and who are prepared to put aside their own concerns for the greater good of the sector and the organisations they work for’ (Ward 2014: 7). She goes on to talk about the value of organisations who are ‘generous with their resources’, particularly in terms of time and knowledge as opposed to money, seeing this as a crucial part of the way in which a sector composed of large, small, funded and unfunded organisations can operate sustainably and effectively.37 This reflects one crucial characteristic of the publicly funded cultural sector as being part of the ‘third sector’ of voluntary organisations whose mission and values relate to objectives and impulses other than profit or competition. Suzy Glass also uses language of generosity to describe how leadership within culture can work productively with overlapping interests, in this case those of artists and audiences. With reference to artists and producers, she observes:

… we’re audiences as well, and we’re people as well, and we live in our society as well; and sometimes actually the relevance is that there’s a group of people who are working together and are expanding and are growing and are understanding more … the knock-on effect of that over the next decade, two decades is going to be huge. And when people walk away with a more generous understanding of how they work, then what they do next will change. (Glass 2013: 4)

Such voices appeal to the element of leadership that depends on other people, as articulated in several of the general definitions, but with an element of solidarity which sits well outside the usual business leadership lexicon. Ward, as a politician and activist as well as artist, sees the importance of this aspect redoubled under the conditions of austerity in UK and European public finances: ‘what the sector needs to do, and what cultural leadership needs to do, is to put aside differences and to find more ways of working together and being a more united front’ (Ward 2014: 9). This articulates a more principled function for cultural leadership quite distinct from that of Rossello’s ‘entrepreneurial senior manager’ (2014: 5), but it is far from clear who exactly is placed to fulfil this role or how it would relate to the existing models of leadership development.

37 Ward gives the example of Northern Stage as an organisation which has demonstrated this kind of generosity (Ward 2014: 11).

Ward employs this personification of cultural leadership - as some kind of responsible entity which needs to ‘do’ something - while addressing with some uncertainty a question of how the intention of cultural policy can be transmitted to ground level implementation. It is an expression of frustration: the cultural sector is described as ‘dysfunctional’ in the same answer, while her experience of policy as an artist has been ‘good words, that often don’t somehow translate’, a tendency which ends up favouring ‘the usual suspects’ (Ward 2014: 9-10). Despite these limitations, the relationship of cultural sector actors to policy opens up a broader dimension in which cultural leadership needs to operate. As Spiers (2014: 18) adds, ‘in terms of cultural policy… it’s trying to understand the environment you work in, and to help shape that policy and tell the story of what you want to achieve’.

The role of the artist did not feature strongly in the definitions of cultural leadership essayed within these interviews: the cultural sector organisational leader remains the central character in the discourse, even as it becomes apparent that the immediate organisation cannot be the only sphere in which their leadership is required to operate. There were, however, some attempts to pinpoint the concept’s relation to creativity. Within arts organisations, business and creativity cross paths (and sometimes swords) in the relationship between the Artistic Director and the Chief Executive or equivalent roles. For Andrew Ormston, this is an area of potential ‘creative tension’ (Ormston 2014: 18). Again, this highlights the relational character of leadership, particularly when it comes to producing cultural work:

Quite often leadership is best expressed in those kind of companies through the relationship between those two … we can’t do anything without collaboration. We can’t produce things, we can’t get them on stages, we can’t get them onto screens without collaboration, so therefore the nature of leadership often has a collaborative element to it. (ibid.)

Ormston also mentions that the Chair of an organisation can be another key part of that dynamic, quoting a number of instances of Chairs performing vital but undervalued leadership functions, managing relationships including those between directors and executives, board members and external stakeholders. The tension between the artistic and management roles can be caricatured as an opposition, but interviewees

82 with principal roles on either side of the fence bristle at this. Sharon Watson (2014: 8- 9), for example, as an artistic director, is assertive about her business abilities, while Jane Spiers takes exception to ‘that insinuation … that if you’re a Chief Executive you’re not an artistic leader, you’re either one or the other. So, in all the jobs I’ve been in, I’ve been a Chief Executive and artistic leader’ (Spiers 2014: 16). For Spiers, the entire role depends on being creatively plugged into the purpose of the organisation. She quotes an instance from one of her former jobs of a newly appointed finance director who questioned why there was talk at a management meeting of developing ambitious new projects when there was no money in the budget. Pointing out that ‘there’s never any money in the budget’, she explained that this was the way the arts work: ‘let’s talk about what we want to do, and what we want that to look like, who’ll benefit, and then we’ll go out there, shape those projects, tell the stories and bring the money in’ (ibid. 12-13). It is not the money that allows the creativity, but the creativity that produces the money.

The reference to telling stories as a key part of the leadership role occurs repeatedly in the interview with Spiers, and perhaps this can be seen as a technique through which cultural leadership achieves its necessary relationship with the future. Still, culture is not the only area of organisational life which requires creativity and the value of storytelling is exploited in many area of political and business leadership. Not everyone thinks that cultural leadership is necessary something that stands up as a distinct practice or style. Cluny Macpherson, a former musician and now public sector cultural manager, is sceptical: ‘I’m not entirely sure that I would … think particularly in differentiating cultural leadership from any other sort of leadership’ (Macpherson 2014: 1). The cultural sector, he says questioningly, is ‘quite good at thinking it’s really, really special. And I’m not sure in terms of leadership it is?’ (ibid. 2). In considering this, interviewees naturally draw on their own experiences of leadership and reflect on their own personal styles, producing accounts coloured by a subjectivity which is nonetheless integral to how cultural leadership is understood and interpreted in different professional environments.

4.2.3. Self-image and leadership style

A leader or manager’s self-assessment of their leadership style is notoriously unreliable. Mats Alvesson has ironically observed how managers who are interviewed for research seem to show much more consideration to their employees than they receive from their own superiors, suggesting that ‘we can thus conclude that the people studied had a much higher moral standing than people not directly interviewed’ (Alvesson 2011: 69). Not only is there a tendency for interviewees to tell a good story about themselves, but there can also be an instinct for positive representation of their organisation. Alvesson has elsewhere categorised the forms of identity construction, moral storytelling and image promotion for which an interview can become a site (Alvesson 2003). It would take a 360 degree feedback process - involving employees, employers or trustees, professional peers and, perhaps, audiences or participants - to establish whether individual interviewees were accurate in identifying their main leadership styles or strengths. However, more than whether or not they are consistent in exhibiting the traits they claim, what is significant is that these are the behaviours they value, to which they aspire, and with which they wish to be associated.

The interviews show evidence of difficulty among some arts professionals to identify comfortably with the idea of being a ‘leader’ in the first place. Suzy Glass reports an unwillingness among young mentees on the International Creative Entrepreneurs (ICE) programme to ‘have to take responsibility for your sector as a leader’, with self- identification as a leader associated with arrogance and unwelcome connotations of authority (Glass 2013: 12). Wariness of those seen to assume authority is shared by Glass herself, who admits that ‘as soon as you define yourself as a “leader” then I don’t really want to be near you’ (ibid. 13). For Dawn Fuller, the idea of being a leader is ‘quite a hard thing to own’ and for Emma Tregidden it is a ‘struggle’ (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 10). Fuller tentatively associates these difficulties with being a woman, just as Jane Spiers (2014: 16) speculates that ‘maybe there is an element of being a woman’ in terms of struggling to be recognised as a credible business leader when operating in the arts. The interview sample size is too small to pick up on a clear gender division as far as this is concerned, and in any case many of the female contributors have no problem with applying this term to themselves (including Spiers and also Archer, Gessler, Ward and Watson).

More significant, perhaps, is a general rejection of explicitly authoritarian styles which is common to men and women in the cohort. James Brining (West Yorkshire Playhouse) accepts that as artistic director he has a primary aesthetic and representative role within his organisation but also argues for ‘a sense of pluralism within the artistic bloodstream’ (Brining 2014: 8). This pluralism may have to be filtered and focused by the artistic leader to define the ‘taste’ of the organisation, ‘but I don’t think it’s like standing at the front and going, “here we go” - it’s not that kind of leadership, I don’t think’ (ibid.). Janet Archer makes clear that for her this is really a question of effectiveness: ‘I don’t believe in top down management, where you’re always telling people what to do. I don’t think you get the best out of people that way’ (Archer 2014b: 9). Describing her leadership style as ‘facilitative’, she draws again on a choreographic metaphor of improvising around a theme, where her role is to ‘create the space for people to be able to use their imagination, and what I’ll do is I’ll pull that together into whatever task it is that we’re setting out to do’ (ibid.). As a current choreographer and artistic director, Sharon Watson (Phoenix Dance Theatre) views her role similarly: ‘I try to enable others to do more … I’m quite happy to sit back and just know that actually every individual in this organisation can function’ – though she acknowledges the importance of her role as ‘the face of the organisation’ at the same time (Watson 2014: 23). These facilitating or enabling approaches imply a kind of ethical responsibility being taken by the leader in a way reminiscent of the ‘leader as gardener’ metaphor, a post-heroic leadership style carrying morally positive connotations through its emphasis on developing and nurturing employees’ potential (Huzzard & Spoelstra 2011). For an arts organisation, this altruism is balanced and repaid by allowing it to benefit from the enhanced creative contributions of its workforce. Indeed, this kind of approach can be seen as not just desirable but essential to productive, relational creative processes. From this point of view, producer Suzy Glass identifies with a ‘distributive leadership’ model:

… to me, one rarely has the best idea; groups of people working together have the best ideas… because I work on two big strategic programmes and I’ll co- produce across both of those. If I was doing it by myself they would be much less impactful than they are when I’m working in groups because I only know what I know and I can’t push the idea any further than my own mind. (Glass 2013: 4)

Roanne Dods foregrounds similar values, distinguishing between the ‘transactional approach, that is contractual and formed and shaped, as opposed to a relational one which … allows for a more organic approach’ (Dods 2014: 3). However, Dods rejects the terminology of ‘distributive’ leadership, saying that for her it ‘doesn’t compute’ and fails to describe ‘an authentic set of relationships’ (ibid. 2-3).

It would be a mistake, perhaps, to see any of these terms or styles as encapsulating a fixed or consistent practice. Neither can one or another of them be neatly identified as a distinctively ‘cultural’ form of leadership. Relational styles in general offer a kind of flexibility in relation to complex tasks and certainly appear suited to the dynamic unpredictability of much creative work. However, interviewees also demonstrate the capacity for drawing on other approaches when it suits them or their task, and sometimes their instincts can be surprisingly traditional. Spiers, who acknowledges in any case that house styles of leadership tend to vary ‘from company to company’, also concedes that ‘we try to be transformational, but there are occasions where a judgement is required in terms of how to get the job done, and that might need to be a bit transactional’ (Spiers 2014: 15). Ormston puts this rather more bluntly: ‘sometimes you do have to tell people what to do, don’t you?’ (Ormston 2014: 5). Here he is referring not only to managerial relationships with employees but also to applying political pressure to organisations and their boards when leading from within the public sector.

Dawn Fuller also sees the need for an occasional ‘driving force’, particularly in terms of relationships with other organisations, which is ‘not about railroading, but it’s not just about consensus either’ (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 14). This is where a leader needs to be ‘inspiring’ and where ‘it is about personality’, indicating that in the third sector there is still a role for relatively heroic attributes, as long as they are used to ‘bring people together in a way that they all feel valued’ (ibid.). Within their organisation, Space 2, Fuller and Tregidden consistently emphasise the contribution to decision making that all employees, volunteers and participants can make, but they also return repeatedly to the importance of defining a central mission. Fuller is conscious of the danger inherent in losing this focus:

But still the drive, it does come back to the vision, doesn’t it … And having a real shared understanding and ownership of that as well. I’m working in

another third sector organisation at the moment where that isn’t happening, and there is no leadership … somebody has to set the direction. (ibid. 11)

This suggests that sustaining leadership’s major function of direction finding becomes increasingly problematic as an organisation or process becomes more diffuse and democratic in its understanding and practice of leadership. Its sites of leadership become far-flung and the lines of communication between them and any central identity or core mission become stretched and, potentially, tangled. This is another issue that is not necessarily specific to the cultural sector, but it is of particular and growing relevance given the expansion in many contemporary artistic fields of participatory and co-creative forms of practice, and the pressures on the sector as a whole to be more democratically accountable in terms of the distribution of public funding (Jackson 2011; Rooke 2014; Stark, Powell & Gordon 2014a; 2014b). It relates to a theoretical concern with distributed leadership models through which it can appear that ‘everyone … seems to have become a leader, or at least a leader in waiting’ (Alvesson & Spicer 2011: 194). This creates a ‘fuzziness’ about what is actually meant by the term, if anything (ibid.). In relation to this, the different attitudes to such terminology shown by Glass and Dods suggest a tension between the desire to escape the clichés or pitfalls of heroic leadership and the need for organisers to establish coherent direction as well as to ensure operational effectiveness.

Returning to organisational issues, a particular form of leadership issue common to many cultural and third sector companies was raised by Chris Fremantle. This is the ‘founder-director’ (Fremantle 2013: 5), the individual associated with establishing a company and presiding over its initial stages of development, whose personality and ambition can at once be the driving force and the locked steering of the organisational vehicle. One familiar rite of passage, discussed in the interview, is that of transition from the founder-director’s management to that of a successor. Another is the formal transfer of governance responsibilities to a board of trustees - particularly when seeking charitable status or other structural change tailored to funding requirements - which recasts the founder as an answerable employee instead of an autonomous leader. This conversation raised an additional distinction within the leadership skillset to add to the tension between artistic and business specialisms. Referring to his experience as the second director of Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Fremantle (2013:

3) observes that ‘people in charge are usually good at one of two things’ when it comes to leading building based arts organisations:

Either - ‘oh, so and so has been very good in terms of moving things forward in terms of its building and its infrastructure, but actually they’ve not really made any progress in terms of its programme.’ And I would say I was the opposite of that. I think I did an awful lot about the programme: I singularly failed to get anywhere with the building substantially. (ibid.)

This is not to value one of these skills over the other, or even to say that both cannot be present in an organisation at the same time. Fremantle stresses that this is not necessarily a rigid split, but a tendency in terms of personalities, which perhaps it is the job of the boards of voluntary organisations to balance, given that ‘in the end, the organisation is its infrastructure as well as its programmes’ (ibid.). This resonates with my own experience of working with founder-directors who have been very good at setting up new organisations or establishing building programmes, but who quickly tire of the day to day running of the resultant business.

These reflections on experience tend to highlight the role of leadership within organisations as interviewees look at their own professional roles. They demonstrate the diversity of leadership scenarios even within this organisational frame rather than suggesting any specifically ‘cultural’ style of leadership. On the contrary, these experiences underline the need for cultural sector leaders to draw on a wide range of styles and techniques to meet the navigational, relational and future-oriented challenges that characterise their work.

4.2.4. Relating to others: cultural leadership as Arendtian action

One of the possible definitions of leading is that of beginning, in the sense isolated by Hannah Arendt in her theory of action (Arendt 1998).38 Arendt observes that of the two verbs meaning ‘to act’ in classical language, it is the one carrying the sense of ‘to

38 Described in the Method and Theory chapter above, section 2.2.3.

88 begin’ (archein in Greek, agere in Latin) which develops into the idea of leading or commanding, while the verb of completion (prattein/gerere) in each case acquires the sense of following or carrying out orders (ibid. 189). In becoming separated from the second aspect of action, completion, the ‘beginner’, or leader, also becomes separate to those on whom the realisation of their initiative is dependent. Through this conception, Arendt shows how leadership becomes associated with authority and strength, but also with isolation. This remains detectable in many contemporary incarnations of leadership, including those represented by metaphors of commander, saint, cyborg and bully (Alvesson & Spicer 2011).

At first sight, there seemed to be some potential for this idea of the ‘beginner’ to resonate with the way leadership might work in culture, and particularly the arts, with its connotations of innovation, invention and looking afresh. When floated among the interviewees, however, the conception proved problematic. Andrew Ormston directly rejected it: ‘I don’t necessarily associate leaders with innovators or beginners at all, actually. I associate leaders with people who take on a responsibility to work out leadership’ (Ormston 2014: 17). Expanding on this, Ormston quotes the example of Sir Michael Lyons, as chair of the CBSO, working behind the scenes to deal with the impact of financial cuts and resultant organisational pressures. Ormston explains that this was about sustainability and consolidation rather than innovation: ‘it was absolutely inspirational leadership, but it was about holding the ring and about keeping a shared purpose’ (ibid.). Valued here are qualities of resilience, tenacity and persistent effort which the ‘beginner’ concept fails to embody. This suggests that the second part of Arendtian action – the capacity to see a situation through, to continue and complete the initiative (in classical terms the role of the follower or the subject) - demands to be reintegrated with the concept of leadership. Arendt (1998: 189) points out that the original meaning for the second Latin verb designating ‘to act’, gerere, is ‘to bear’ – an appropriate term to associate with Ormston’s emphasis on ‘responsibility’.

Theatre director James Brining also shows an instinctive desire to integrate the two dimensions of action, in his case within a future-oriented idea of leadership. Brining follows much leadership theory in differentiating between ideas of ‘leadership’ and ‘management’, but does so in terms of their respective relationships with the present and the future, arguing that leadership ‘is about 90% about what’s going to happen and 10% about what’s happening now’, whereas management is the other way round. He

89 acknowledges that a ‘beginner’ shows this kind of focus by ‘imagining something, seeing how it might happen and setting it off, and then going on to the next thing’, but in his role this is not enough:

Another part of me likes the sense of completion that you get by making a show, in that you may imagine something happen, and then you actually make it happen ... So there is a sense of being a beginner, but also being a completer-finisher, as a director, is really important. (Brining 2014: 10)

Arendt’s point about the conceptual separation of the beginner as leader from those others whose contribution is necessary to the realisation of an action is that it creates a delusion of independence – ‘the fallacy of the strong man who is powerful because he is alone’ (Arendt 1998: 190). While there are myths, stereotypes and even real life instances in most areas of cultural practice which conform to this isolated ‘hero’ image – the tortured genius, the ‘difficult’ artist, the incomprehensible modernist, the untouchable star – each of these miss an important dimension when it comes to being an effective or influential cultural leader in the multi-dimensional professional contexts typically described by the interviewees. This can be related to one of the three defining features of action for Arendt - its plurality (ibid. 7). Certainly, for Sue Hoyle and the Clore Leadership Programme, something more than individual talent is needed of a leader:

… someone who works brilliantly on their own, doing their own thing, but who doesn’t engage with the context in which they’re working and with other people within that context, I wouldn’t define them as leaders. They might be inspired but I wouldn’t define them as leaders, in my definition anyway. (Hoyle 2014b: 2-3).

This point is reinforced by Pablo Rossello, who asserts that ‘if you’re a cultural leader, you need to be aware of what’s happening out there. You need to have a network’ (Rossello 2014: 6). Meanwhile, as Jane Spiers suggests, this is not just a matter of working with others to realise a vision, but also involves a more substantial and dynamic engagement with the world. She sees that, for organisational leaders, this means dealing with external as well as internal environments, ‘trying to see what you

90 can contribute or how you can fit in’, but also ‘how you can help shape that, if you can, as opposed to just receiving something’ (Spiers 2014: 18). Not only action’s plurality but its ‘boundlessness’ comes into play (Arendt 1998: 190). This may include engaging with public attitudes to the arts and culture regionally, taking on local authority priorities and other policy questions, or responding to the needs of individual artists. This sounds like a straightforward prescription, but not all cultural organisations show willingness to get involved with issues outside their own immediate interests. Dawn Fuller recalls working with voluntary sector organisations in Leeds a decade or so ago when ‘there were no other arts organisations that seemed to perceive themselves at least enough of a third sector organisation to become involved with the broader third sector networks’ (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 15). She notices that a number of larger organisations do much less than they could in this respect. In a close echo of Hoyle’s language she observes: ‘they only go to things that are of benefit to themselves. And that isn’t leadership’ (ibid.).

Taken together, these reflections point towards a need for cultural sector leadership which spurns heroic models and works more consistently with Arendt’s integrated concept of action, which ‘always establishes relationships and therefore has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across boundaries’ (Arendt 1998: 190).

A further implication of this boundlessness can be identified in conversations with policy makers who are aware that influencing the circumstances that shape cultural production means engagement with processes external to the sector’s own politics. Barbara Gessler, from the perspective of the European Commission, comments that ‘cultural policy is not just cultural policy. It’s how you take into account internal market policy, competition policy, trade negotiations, things like that’; a point which is echoed by MEP Julie Ward when reflecting on the need to be on other committees in addition to the culture committee at the European Parliament (Ward 2014: 12).39 Some boundaries do, perhaps, need to be imposed on the boundlessness of actions relevant to cultural leadership if the concept is not to be stretched beyond meaning, but these observations are enough to suggest that the field of cultural leadership is something

39 Ward reports being lobbied by people within the cultural sector, when she first became an MEP, who advised: ‘don’t go on the culture committee, because it’s got no power and it’s not important’ (Ward 2014: 4). The potential to change things is associated with trade, defence, employment and economy – not just by politicians but by cultural professionals too.

91 much broader than the combined remits of those who lead within the cultural sector. In practical terms, sectoral professionals tend to operate within a far more limited day to day discourse.

The third feature of Arendtian action, its unpredictability, is already implied by these complexities. It appears particularly clearly in Cluny Macpherson’s local authority experience:

… there’s never a linear story about, ok, well if you go and meet this politician on this day and say this thing then they’ll do this, and they’ll do this, and they’ll do that. So you can’t simplify it in that way, because you don’t know when one action will lead you. (Macpherson 2014: 7)

For this reason Macpherson sees leadership often emerging through the ‘totality of your smaller day to day decisions’ rather than through the direct impact of the bigger ones (ibid.). Within the arts, in particular, it can be argued that unpredictability is to be welcomed and even valued. For example, François Matarasso recalls the first arts evaluation that he was required to do, in which he concluded that the project concerned had indeed produced benefits for the learning disabled participants involved, but really these ‘had come about because we hadn‘t intended to produce them’ (Matarasso 2013: 24). They had instead been a by-product of the freedom and space allowed within the project. Such experiences are frustrating to policy makers searching for evidence of instrumental cause and effect but important for understanding the nature of action in relation to leadership processes.

4.3. Inhabiting the concepts

4.3.1. Language, rhetoric and discourse

Several interviewees demonstrated awareness of how different forms of language and certain types of rhetoric shaped what was possible for their own role as managers or practitioner as well as larger narratives of cultural development. Strongly conscious of

92 this is Janet Archer, who came into Creative Scotland as Chief Executive immediately following a high profile leadership crisis in the organisation, popularly known as ‘the stooshie’, which saw the resignation of her predecessor and his deputy following a loss of confidence and widespread protest by a significant cross-section of the Scottish arts sector in 2012 (Stevenson 2014). Applying for the job, she took advice from her former boss, Arts Council England’s Chief Executive Alan Davey, asking him what she should focus on the most: ‘and he got straight to the point and said you need to get the language right. Because part of the problem for Creative Scotland had been that… it was using business-speak’ (Archer 2014b: 3).

Having been created as a new body in 2009, Creative Scotland was unique among the successor bodies to the Arts Council of Great Britain in having film and media added to its arts and heritage remit. The name of the organisation was itself a symbolic acceptance of New Labour’s ‘creative industries’ rhetoric, one that was seen in some quarters as an unnecessary import of Westminster language and preoccupations, bringing with it a suspect instrumental and commercial agenda (Schlesinger 2009).40 This history has pressurised an already complex cross-sectoral communication task. Several lessons are apparent to Archer as a leader in this situation. Firstly, ‘perception matters, just as much as reality’ (Archer 2014b: 6). The impression of what the organisation stands for has proved to be just as important as what it does: ‘and even when you’re thinking about leadership, you have to deal with all that ephemeral stuff as well as the hard facts’ (ibid.). Moreover, the ability to be ‘multi-lingual’ (ibid. 3), to be able to translate between different interest groups, is essential. Archer speaks of the need to ‘communicate with an artist in a way that an artist wants to be communicated with, but obviously when I talk to government or the private sector then one uses a different shape and tone in terms of how you actually articulate your words’ (ibid.).

A criticism that Pablo Rossello makes of the cultural leadership’s development as a concept is at exactly this level of language. Discussing the British Council’s programme, Cultural Leadership International, he recalls how in its first year:

40 Schlesinger, writing in 2009, derides Creative Scotland’s gestation process, calling the (then) nascent organisation ‘the unloved child of two ill-matched parents: bureaucracy and intellectual dependency’ (Schlesinger 2009: 11). He traces the importation of the creativity agenda from New Labour into the mid-2000s Scottish Executive coalition, but sees the subsequent Nationalist government as ‘astonishingly’ unquestioning of this blueprint (ibid. 12). Presciently, he summarises the new body’s challenges as establishing credible leadership, resolving competing arts and creative industries funding priorities and demonstrating public benefit of the model (ibid.).

CLI basically imported a rhetoric. It was very much coming from a human resources point of view. It was very much responding to the UK agenda, this UK need, and transported it into an international context – into another context that was complex in itself, and not uniform. Because we’re talking about EU Europe and the Middle East. (Rossello 2014: 3)

The constraints of the rhetoric thus become revealed by its export to environments where its underlying values assumptions no longer apply. Rossello further observes that the Cultural Leadership Programme operated with reference to ‘a very institutional version of the cultural leader’ such as ‘someone who could drive the Southbank Centre’ (Rossello 2014: 6). He detects an exclusive quality to the discourse embodied in the programme’s contribution to the literature, the Cultural Leadership Reader (Kay & Venner 2010). In his view, and in terms of the possible definitions of cultural leadership, it lacks ‘the multiplicity of meanings, because I think here you have… all the people that inhabit this Jude Kelly world, but you don’t have … someone working in Barking with the community – you don’t have those voices’ (Rossello 2014: 7). It is limited instead to ‘cultural executives’ (ibid.). This kind of grass roots voice is represented well by Dawn Fuller and Emma Tregidden among the interviewees, who demonstrate a notably high awareness of the importance of language and the difficulties of finding an appropriate register to communicate their values and intentions. Fuller makes explicit reference to the language of policy, mentioning Arts Council England’s Great Art for Everyone strategy and consciously positioning Space 2 as an organisation which can challenge ‘the dominant form’ of creating art, ‘where you have the professional artist that creates and then it’s performed to a passive … consumer’ (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 2). The organisation’s determination to work in a way which devolves substantial decision making powers to its participants and volunteers generates a growing discomfort with the language currently available to describe and present its practice. Fuller slips between terms: ‘how we deliver our art projects, I suppose – or facilitate; “deliver” is going to become the wrong word. So much of the language we’re using now … will have to shift’ (ibid.). Going further, she asserts that as the organisation is ‘co-producing and co-designing work, therefore the language will need co-producing and co-designing’ (ibid. 3). This indicates an organisation determined to establish its position in relation to national policy, not so as

94 to adjust or compromise its mission, but with a view to demonstrating its relevance and finding appropriate and resonant language with which to communicate it.

Language and other forms of rhetoric can serve to conceal as much to reveal. François Matarasso expresses scepticism of the way in which Arts Council England tells visual stories about its priorities within its publications, with pictures of ‘opera, or the Royal Shakespeare Company, or an orchestra’ notable by their absence:

What I see in all their publications is pictures of children doing workshops with face paint on, and carnivals, and some rather elegant visual art work in a nice public park ... And that’s the visual rhetoric that they use. They don’t want to draw attention to the fact that, of their current £350M budget, nine organisations top slice well over £100M of it. (Matarasso 2013: 11)

Even within the institution, the process of communication has its frustrations. Remarking on the contrast between working at Arts Council England and arriving at Creative Scotland, Janet Archer admits that ‘I spent years feeling as if the communications people were trying to wash out any kind of light and shade’; within the corporate approach ‘the whole focus has been to get to the point and limit what we say’ rather than develop ‘depth of understanding’ (Archer 2014b: 4). The attempt at clarity opens the door to banality. Not that such vices are limited to the communications of strategic organisations. Matarasso (2013: 12) also critiques the meaninglessness of many evaluation reports submitted to funders which operate more as monitoring and ‘enforcement’ processes, leading to routine declarations of success rather than becoming critical enquiries or learning tools. As Julie Ward puts it, ‘lots of people write reports and say that it was brilliant, and it’s not the truth’ (Ward 2014: 11). The effective use of language lies at the heart of many leadership processes in the cultural sector from the communication of national policy to the articulation of a community artist’s practice. The dominance of a particular discursive frame can be revealed among the frustrations of trying to communicate fresh ideas in stale language or seeking tangible meaning amid jargon and the party line. Fluent engagement with these linguistic issues emerges as a critical part of the navigational challenge facing leaders at all levels in maintaining oversight of the direction and meaning of their practice.

4.3.2. Creative and cultural industries

Among the linguistic issues facing managers and practitioners in the cultural sector, several interviewees demonstrate a relationship with or response to the shifts already traced in the policy literature between notions such as the cultural industries, creative industries and the creative economy (Garnham 2005; Hesmondhalgh 2007; O’Connor 2010; Hewison 2014; Bell & Oakley 2015). For several of those in strategic roles, this language is built into their job titles, organisations and work programmes, from Archer’s role in Creative Scotland to Gessler and Pasquali’s responsibilities for the Creative Europe programme. Pablo Rossello’s job in the British Council, meanwhile, was as Acting Director of the Creative Economy team, which – he pointed out – had been called Creative Industries during the time that Cultural Leadership International was running (Rossello 2014: 1). If this suggests a movement within the organisation towards a more economically driven model of working, it is one that Rossello clearly understands as a modernisation and maturing of cultural policy. This is a shift from ‘a traditional cultural policy framework’ based on the French model of government patronage ‘to a much more comprehensive understanding of culture’ and in particular support for the ‘economic, the industrial elements’. This needs different alliances and creates new challenges for cultural leadership:

So that’s where you bring support for business development, you bring in the Ministry of Trade, you bring in education … you understand it as an industry, as a proper economic sector. So that shift we thought was very interesting, and being a cultural leader implied that you needed to … understand what this shift was about, if not influence, and make sure that your Ministry of Culture was moving in that direction. (Rossello 2014: 4)

The development of Cultural Leadership International is therefore based on accepting the creative industries argument for investment in the arts and taking it as a challenge to step up the cultural sector’s game in relation both to business and government. In this conception a cultural leader is expected to run with these changes not just from a financial point of view, but in terms of becoming influential beyond their organisation and changing the way in which culture is conceived politically. This need for wider awareness is also recognised by Janet Archer, whose remit at Creative Scotland

96 includes media, film and creative industries as well as the arts. She argues that leaders need to:

… be cognisant, and keep across of all that’s going on elsewhere. That requires a particular sort of aptitude and dynamic, in terms of your drive to network beyond your immediate comfort zone. (Archer 2014b: 7)

Success depends on being ‘competitive’ and ‘productive’, particularly at the ‘sharper edge of the more commercial creative industries edge of things’ (ibid.). In relation to creative industries contexts, these interviewees are more likely to emphasise attributes of alertness, competitiveness and external focus in a way which contrasts with the values of generosity, inclusiveness and facilitation which tend to arise in discussion of artistic processes and vision. The idea that a leader is someone who drives change outside the immediate environs of their organisation or area of interest nevertheless recurs.

The European Commission’s Barbara Gessler further reflects the way in which the creative industries’ contribution to economic growth is now a mainstream part of cultural policy thinking at international level:

… we’ve based Creative Europe on the Europe 2020 strategy, the contribution to smart and inclusive growth. There’s also the contribution to the small and medium enterprises sector … to research and to telecoms and all these things that are also very important. So it’s not just … the typical cultural sector, but it’s seen in a much broader context of creativity (Gessler 2014: 3)

These contributions and relationships are substantially consistent with the ‘concentric circle’ model of the cultural and creative industries (Hewison 2014; Bell & Oakley 2015): the ultimate justifications for the investment programme are economic, relating to enterprise and a more general idea of creativity and innovation. There is undoubtedly also an element of political astuteness in showing the usefulness of the cultural portfolio according to other people’s agendas. Both Gessler and Pasquali make reference to the fact that culture and media have only relatively recently become

97 legitimate areas for direct EU intervention, and Gessler highlights the still fragile status of the programme by pointing out that ‘we don’t even have 1% of the budget’ (Gessler 2014: 3).41 However, the Creative Europe programme received a 9% budget uplift in 2014 compared with its predecessor Media and Culture programmes (Culture Action Europe 2013) against a backdrop of 6% cuts to the overall European Commission budget (European Commission 2013), indicating the effectiveness of the sector’s networking tactics but also the pressure to conform to an orthodoxy of ‘innovation, digital challenge, employment and competitive advantage on the international stage’, four areas which have been identified as ‘keywords’ for the Creative Europe project (Autissier 2014: 95). Gessler is of the clear opinion that the European Commission has increased investment primarily through becoming convinced of the jobs and growth contribution made by the previous Culture Programme (2007-13) to the European labour market and economy (Gessler 2014: 12). Nonetheless, there are other growth areas clamouring for a slice of the budget. For Pasquali, it certainly helps that culture has the capacity to ‘bring stories to people’ and ‘help better understanding of each other in Europe’, something which ‘makes the creative industries even more interesting to support’ (Pasquali 2014: 5). Despite what sometimes appears to be a total reduction of cultural subsidy justification to the financial values of the creative economy agenda, these issues of meaning making still retain persuasive relevance.

This last point is articulated strongly and from a more critical perspective by François Matarasso (2013), who takes issue with the policy rhetoric of the creative industries. He argues provocatively that, if governments really believed that job creation and profitability were the fundamental ends of creative activity and the application of its technologies, then then they might as well be investing in the pornography industry. What this highlights is a disjunction between rhetoric which is ‘happening in a kind of amoral space’ and the questions of meaning, purpose and social relevance inherent to creative work (Matarasso 2013: 7). Matarasso is ‘not interested in art independent of ethical and political and ideological and value judgement – you can’t have art without talking about those things’ (ibid.). His point is that actual patterns of investment

41 The legal basis of EU support for culture was established in Article 128 of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, allowing the (then) Community to ‘contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States’ (Council of the European Communities 1992: 48). This eventually led to the series of Culture programmes (from 2000), which, combined with the Media programme, became Creative Europe from 2014. The Media programme itself dates from the 1980s. Despite the previous lack of legal framework there is a history of cultural co-operation at European level dating from the 1954 European Cultural Convention (Autissier 2014: 92-3).

98 demonstrate that these areas of ethical, aesthetic and social value do remain important even where they are not being mentioned by policymakers. This suggests that, if policy as enacted is really informed by values which don’t appear in the rhetorical justifications for investment, there is some level of dishonesty in the rhetoric. It also creates a risk that, if there is a gap in the discourse where value should be, then the system will proceed according to assumed or embedded values without questioning or updating them. Matarasso disagreed when I suggested that a possible result of this rhetoric was that these areas of value were not being sufficiently discussed in society; he could see plenty of ways in which such discussion had in fact proliferated in recent years (ibid. 7-8). He also argues that, in terms of actual creative industry development, changes to the media since the creation of Channel 4 in the 1980s have had much greater impact than anything produced by policy rhetoric from the 1990s onwards. His objection to creative industries rhetoric appears to be more that it is uninteresting that that it is damaging. However, his analysis at least suggests a risk that, where ethical and aesthetic issues remain unarticulated in the prevailing discourse, those charged with implementing cultural policy will struggle to serve them coherently. There is also a question of whether public bodies and agencies can retain the trust of their sectors to embody or defend values that they appear reluctant to voice. The reluctance itself begs questions in terms of what it is that public institutions have to fear from articulating the values on which they are founded and according to which they make financial decisions.42

An additional term appearing among the interviews, raised by Andrew Ormston, is ‘creative entrepreneurship’ (used interchangeably with ‘cultural entrepreneurship’). This appears in the context of a discussion about public funding and is related to another ethical difficulty, in this case that of the responsibility that publicly funded individuals or organisations have in relationship to civil society. As a former cultural services director for two cities, Ormston sees this as being generally well understood within the arts, with a ‘tradition … among some of the best arts leaders’ to be ‘hugely active’ in their wider community (Ormston 2014: 11). This is not a reference to what organisations or individuals might be required to do directly by funders but a matter of inhabiting a relationship with a place and playing a role in local development. However, the creative entrepreneurship agenda conjures an attitude of ‘I’m dealing in

42 It can be speculated that at least part of the answer relates to anxiety about how things will play in the media, which would therefore appear as a kind of anticipatory influence and constraint in relation to public cultural policy discourse, even when not actively commenting.

99 my intellectual property and I will make my money, thanks very much’ (ibid.). This is problematic because ‘it’s not necessarily acceptable for an arts practitioner to get a bunch of public money and to not feel that they have some kind of responsibilities that come with that’ (ibid.). These thoughts suggest that Ormston sees ‘creative entrepreneur’ as being effectively another term for ‘arts practitioner’, and certainly indicating someone just as likely to be in receipt of public funding. The difference is in the language used and the ethical relationship it represents. Ormston is by no means anti-business, and is elsewhere very positive about the relationship between business and the arts, citing examples of strong private sector involvement in cultural and public realm development in Birmingham and Reading (ibid. 5-6). However he shows suspicion of a profit-oriented outlook being brought into cultural development under the guise of entrepreneurial language, changing the relationship between the arts and civil society. This further illustrates the potentially negative connotations of ‘business- speak’ (Archer 2014b: 3) and the ideological loading that certain terms import into the discourse.

There is perhaps a love-hate relationship with the world of business in the cultural sector. Jane Spiers, as an experienced Chief Executive who talks about striking over 400 deals per year in her day to day role (Spiers 2014: 16), rails against the artificial separation of the two identities:

people underestimate the skills and abilities that you need to work in the arts… People talk about ‘arts’ and ‘business’. There are organisations in the UK called ‘Arts and Business’ as if they’re two different things. You know. The arts is a business. (ibid.)

Yet business language is constantly encountered as a barrier to communicating cultural values. Producer Suzy Glass sums up this relationship: ‘I’ve been working with business plans since the year dot. I find them fascinating but I also find the language absolutely horrific’ (Glass 2013: 2). In the course of the interview she welcomes being questioned about ‘guiding principles’ instead of the more usual need to talk ‘about aims and objectives, and, you know, the whole kind of templated way of thinking about your work’ (ibid.). These experiences suggest that leadership, and especially cultural

100 leadership, can only operate meaningfully within a discourse that allows expression and discussion of fundamental values and principles.

4.3.3. The meanings of resilience

Resilience, n. … The quality or fact of being able to recover quickly or easily from, or resist being affected by, a misfortune, shock, illness, etc.; robustness; adaptability. (Oxford English Dictionary)

It has already been observed that resilience has become a favoured term in cultural policy since the financial crisis.43 As its dictionary definition makes clear, resilience is a term of response; it is a quality demanded or made evident by adverse circumstances. Its literal - rather than, as above, figurative - meaning is ‘elasticity’ (ibid.), the ability to rebound into position after being bent out of shape or stretched. The term is discussed in six of the 18 interviews, twice when introduced by me and four times when interviewees used the term spontaneously. It is not ubiquitous in discourse around leadership and cultural policy but it is common. At first glance, the relationship to misfortune or shock suggests a quality which is defined in essentially negative terms. Jane Spiers acknowledges the need for ‘being resilient in that climate, you know, where arts and culture is pretty vulnerable when it comes to cuts, in terms of economic decline’ (Spiers 2014: 5). Suzy Glass describes a pressure in the arts sector to ‘stabilise’ in response to the advice of enterprise and funding organisations, ‘and that’s how we de-risk, and how you limit your liability, and all the rest of it’ (Glass 2013; 10). However, she also sees this as ‘inappropriate’ and not suited to how the arts actually function. The interpretations of resilience that emerge as useful to interviewees focus more on the ‘adaptability’ part of its meaning rather than the ‘robustness’; or rather, adaptability appears as a precondition for the robustness which is demanded.

Two more pairs of specific meanings come into focus in relation to this. One involves a distinction between ‘personal’ and ‘organisational’ resilience, which is made by Sue Hoyle (2014b: 12). In doing so, Hoyle refers to Mark Robinson’s (2010) essay for Arts

43 See section 3.7 above.

101

Council England, Making Adaptive Resilience Real, which divides the essential characteristics of resilience between ‘resources’ and ‘adaptive skills’, of which leadership is at the top of the list (Robinson 2010: 27). Hoyle asserts that ‘you can be both flexible and resilient’ and argues that organisational resilience is predicated on individuals who can remain focused on the change they want to make: ‘being able to stay true to your purpose whatever is happening around you’ even while ‘constantly having to refine, tune, shifting, and so on’ (Hoyle 2014b: 12). Janet Archer, who as an ex-Arts Council England manager also references ‘adaptive resilience’ (2014: 8), articulates a similar definition: ‘being able to adapt in a changing environment, and hold on to your core purpose, not let go of your value system or integrity, but actually operating in a different way’ (ibid. 9). Spiers, meanwhile, refers to people in the sector ‘being resilient as individuals’ to give themselves and their organisations the ability to ‘pick ourselves up’ after getting knocked back (Spiers 2014: 5). Organisational resilience in the end depends upon these individual capacities and individual visions: the two are interrelated. Closing this circle, Emma Tregidden and Dawn Fuller (2014: 16) describe how a major purpose of their organisation and work is to ‘make people more resilient’ in their local communities.

The other important distinction is between financial and behavioural resilience in organisations. From different sides of the funding fence, Janet Archer and James Marriott make similar comments about the financial imperatives. Marriott emphasises how his organisation, Platform, ‘straddles both the arts and environment and human rights in its economic base’ and the importance of this both for the nature of the work produced and ‘its long term resilience’ (Marriott 2013: 5). It is vital for the organisation’s independence, and also its voice, not to rely disproportionately on any single funder. Archer, meanwhile, tactfully describes resilience as recognising that ‘an arts organisation operating on 70, 80, 90 per cent public funding from one organisation, from one body, is not necessarily the healthiest way to be’ from the point of view of financial risk (Archer 2014b: 8); hand in hand with this are principles of sound organisational management, ‘being ordered and structured and prudent … taking care of the housekeeping that has to be done within any given entity in a systematic and proper way’ (ibid.). The other side of resilience is about the character of an organisation: ‘how you look after your people, and how open you are to being flexible in an ever changing world, and adaptive to be able to respond to opportunity’, rather than following set processes (Archer 2014b: 8). Spiers also identifies the relationship

102 of resilience to change, looking beyond the negative aspect of mere response to misfortune:

… it’s about being resilient in the face of the fact that the only constant is change, in life … You see, I think resilience is quite a proud value, as much as a hunkering down and battening down the hatches value. I think it’s one about, you know - no matter what adversity faces us, we’ll get out there and carry on, because that’s the kind of people we are, and that’s the kind of company are. (Spiers 2014: 16)

The idea of resilience, despite some connotations of embattlement, is generally embraced as a positive value by these interviewees - less about ‘hunkering down’, more about building on the sense of elasticity. It also coalesces as permanent value rather than anything specific to periods of crisis. Sharon Watson is clear about the danger that exists if change is not embraced in a flexible way:

… there’s a lot of organisations that don’t exist anymore. That maybe started off in a same, similar place and tried to grow the company – they don’t exist anymore. So for Phoenix to still be here after 33 years, we have to keep reinventing ourselves, or keep adding to what I think our values are, and keep that message very clear. (Watson 2014: 4)

The challenge of resilience is repeatedly expressed as a dialogue of change and constancy: continual reinvention to sustain an unwavering core purpose. Collectively the interviewees describe a need for a kind of proactive resilience, driving change as much as dealing with it, rather than a reactive version. The core leadership challenge of engaging positively with an uncertain future is rearticulated in these contemporary understandings of resilience. Some further implications of the ‘discourse of flexibility’ (Jackson 2011: 23) to which such ideas of resilience can be seen to relate are explored further below (4.10.1).

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4.4. Quality and value

… all culture is ideological in the sense that it is a creator and a communicator of meanings, of values. That’s why human beings do it: because you want to try and say this is better than that, I believe in this, this is how I see the world, this is what matters to me, this is important. (Matarasso 2013: 13)

4.4.1. From principle to process

Given that communicating meaning is such a fundamental part of what arts and culture are all about then it’s not surprising that all the interviews at some point come back to discussions of value – or rather, of values: the principles on which cultural work and organisations are based. A number of different positions and perspectives open up. Values are communicated within companies, across the sector, and out to wider society. They form the basis for how leaders manage the relationships which allow development of their work as well as the impetus for creating the work itself. In some respects, the situation is the same as for any other sphere of activity. As Jane Spiers points out, ‘having values isn’t exactly original. Pretty much every big business in the world has them. But the difference is - do they mean anything? Do you work to them?’ (Spiers 2014: 7).

For Spiers, making organisational values meaningful is the key to creating a ‘dynamic company’ (ibid.), and she illustrates the need to build up a company culture and the processes through which she has done so with her experiences from Perth Concert Hall as well as Aberdeen Performing Arts (ibid. 3-4). These instances spotlight the need within organisations to establish internal relationships based on shared principles and forms of behaviour. At Perth this was about creating an environment where ‘people respected each other, and were courteous, and where people felt involved and informed’ (ibid. 3). Essential to this is ‘devolved leadership’, ensuring that people are ‘buying into the values and going out there and doing it for you’ (ibid. 15). Spiers rates this as ‘the biggest challenge in trying to lead an organisation’, but fundamental because ‘you cannot be everywhere’.

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These principles can be interpreted simply as good general business practice, but Sharon Watson, as Artistic Director at Phoenix Dance Theatre, demonstrates how sorting out core organisational values internally can be strongly connected to the creative mission of a company. Watson came into her present role having originally been a dancer for Phoenix and subsequently Rehearsal Director. At the time, the dancers were employed on nine month contracts, as is common with many dance organisations, and were required to reapply to the company each year after the off- season. Company finances were tight when Watson took up post but she persuaded her board to make a principled move to 12 month contracts during her first year. Reminding Watson of this during the interview, I recalled how I had once heard her argue the company would never ask its marketing manager to take three months off and that the key artistic personnel on whose skill the whole operation depends should not be treated differently. Watson remains passionate about the justice of this principle:

… otherwise, how do they really build themselves a future? And they earn the benefits that any other member of the organisation can have. Why shouldn’t a dancer be one of those people that engages with that? (Watson 2014: 2-3)

Referencing her experience as Rehearsal Director, she also defends its pragmatism:

It was the challenge of knowing, actually, it’s not cost-effective for an organisation to do that. We’re not a project company… going back to the beginning every time…it wasn’t producing the quality that I felt that could be done by have members that were long term. (ibid.)

The potential for improved quality combines with the enhanced loyalty and commitment of long-term company members to produce the idea of a ‘Phoenix dancer’ (ibid. 3), which becomes a brand that the dancers take with them when they eventually go elsewhere. The artistic reputation of the company therefore develops both within the present work and through dancers’ subsequent careers, and each element is rooted in the company principles and values as enacted through its internal structure and relationships. The reputational enhancement is obviously good for the company not

105 just artistically but also in a business sense when it comes to relationships with funders and venues. This is perhaps an example of a principled leadership decision, informed by artistic expertise, which ultimately results in an improved business outcome. However, Watson affirms that success has to be measured in terms of the principles and values, sometimes despite financial calculation rather than because of it, which can produce reluctance elsewhere in the company:

But sometimes you just think, well, we might have to spend a little extra, but it’s worth it. And let’s kind of get the values down first, and see … The resistance is a bit hard sometimes, because I feel that it distracts me also from the main activity of the artistic development of the organisation, and I start getting into business structures and plans and models and administrative work that’s … not where my heart is! (ibid. 8)

Spiers makes a similar point from a different perspective, observing that applicants for capital project funding can get so absorbed in the mechanics of a building that they forget that funders themselves are ‘interested in funding a vision, and the bricks and mortar… is just simply the means to deliver that vision’ (Spiers 2014: 13).

Several interviewees, notably the three producers in the group (Dods, Fremantle and Glass), allude to the importance of being able to stay focused on process rather than hastening to secure particular outcomes, whether artistic, financial or social. There are suggestions that this is one capacity distinctively relevant to leaders in creative roles who need to open up possibilities rather than close them down. Roanne Dods claims that ‘the ability of a producer to keep ambivalence open for longer is different than a traditional hero leader ... traditionally leaders are quick decision makers’ (Dods 2014: 4). Instead, part of the necessary skillset is to be able to communicate appropriately with team members or funders for whom uncertainty of outcome creates anxiety. Here the relational aspect of cultural leadership comes into contact with the ability to work productively with the unforeseen. Chris Fremantle identifies a similar principle, referring to Claire Pentecost’s essay Notes on continental drift, which talks of the artist’s impulse to ‘continually suspend the moment of value’ and to ‘operate in the moment before value’ (Pentecost 2012: 23), pointing to a need within cultural leadership to protect creative experience from being compromised by pre-emptive

106 grasping for fixed meaning (Fremantle 2013: 10). Suzy Glass, meanwhile, reports how she freezes in the face of ‘what’ questions in relation to her work, but opens up to the ‘how’, which is where ‘the innovation starts to appear’ (Glass 2013: 17). Referring specifically to the situation of Creative Scotland immediately post-‘stooshie’, Glass judges that the country ‘is still focussed on the end point, rather than the people and the processes that they’re using’ (ibid.). Again, this is an argument that institutional pressure to produce guaranteed results is detrimental to the creative process and, ultimately, to generating satisfactory outcomes.

This resonates with an experience recounted by Matarasso of evaluating a project for the Department of Health in 1989 which had been aimed at people with learning disabilities. His conclusion was that the project had produced benefits for participants, but had done so precisely ‘because we hadn’t intended to produce them…nobody was intending to do them any good, and that was why they had freedom and space to explore’ (Matarasso 2013: 24). The outcomes were genuine, but not predictable or subject to planning. These accounts are warnings to policy makers and also practitioners who start from the desired outcome and work backwards in search of the appropriate process. They provide at least a partial clue to the mystery of self- defeating policy interventions (Sieber 1981), at least as far as arts programmes are concerned. They also hint at the existence of a delicate dynamic, particular to artistic exploration, according to which it is driven by questions of value while reserving final judgement. This opens up a role for cultural leadership in creating space for ambivalence and time for slow decisions. To operate in this way implies a need for subtle skills of persuasion and negotiation coupled with great clarity of purpose.

4.4.2. Unfortunate complexity: other qualities of culture

On the relatively few occasions where ideas of excellence or quality are directly discussed, interviewees tend to focus on the quality of the process underpinning the work. Defining excellence may be a minefield, but as Jane Spiers neatly puts it, ‘you can start feeling much more comfortable about the labels of excellence and quality if you just see it as a process of striving to be the very best you can be at whatever you do’ (Spiers 2014: 11). In relation to participatory and community work, quality of

107 process appears as an integral part of the quality of the work itself, not least because the social challenges and safeguarding issues inherent in the projects. Sharon Watson and Emma Tregidden both refer directly and spontaneously to risk assessments and other project management mechanics when talking about their organisations’ approach to creating quality of experience for participants and partners. In each case there is concern for the complex sets of relationships that make the work possible and define its character. Both organisations (Phoenix and Space 2) depend on partnerships with other cultural and community organisations and both use external venues, so high standards of professionalism and reliability are essential to preserve good will. Watson asserts straightforwardly that with Phoenix ‘you get artistic excellence when you look at the end product in the studio, and then obviously to the stage’; her concern is to move on from that to the ‘different ways in which I would hope that people could find their way in’, either as audiences or participants (Watson 2014: 5). An essential part of this is to develop long term relationships with young people and families so that ‘in terms of the quality of the work [it] is underpinned with meaning, and this is something that doesn’t just happen for today but… we can move it forward’ (ibid.). The primary outcome is that the ‘young person’s experience is of value to them’ (ibid.).

Tregidden talks in similar terms, placing professional reliability at the core of quality experience for all stakeholders and describing her company’s processes as a ‘package’. This includes processes for marketing, front of house, ticketing, crew and risk management designed to create a hassle free experience for host venues: ‘they know we’ll get the audiences in through the door, and the quality on that stage will be good’ (ibid.). These ideas of process and quality are closely entwined. The ethos of a community oriented company such as Space 2 may be inclusive and facilitative, but when it comes to professional processes and production standards they are necessarily hard-headed. Practice must be wedded to principle or the relationships that allow the work to continue cannot be sustained.

Tregidden and her fellow director Dawn Fuller’s concern to present a watertight operation to cultural sector peers and the world at large can be related to their ongoing struggle to find the right language through which to represent their work. Each is an aspect of impression management as they seek to articulate the company’s social priorities while heading off any suggestion of compromise on artistic standards or production values. Eschewing the language of ‘community arts’, they now use ‘arts

108 and social change’ as a favoured term, but are still playing with different labels and looking to see what assumptions become attached to them in the surrounding discourse (Tregidden & Fuller 2014: 3-4). In these ways they simultaneously anticipate and deflect possible external assumptions about their values and priorities. Tregidden and Fuller thus find themselves on the contemporary front line of an old cultural battle, the tussle between ‘access’ and ‘excellence’. They are not fighting for one side or the other, however, but trying to establish a position for more broad based cultural expression. To an extent they represent the same values as the community arts movement of the 1970s, in the sense that it was making work ‘in and with a community, which was encouraged to participate in the process as a way of self- expression, often leading to social action’ (Sinclair 1995: 224, original emphasis). They evade the term because of its ‘baggage’ (Tregidden & Fuller 2014: 4) - the expectations that others project onto it - but they might agree with Robin Guthrie, the former chair of the Arts Council of Great Britain’s sub-committee on community arts, when he took the view that the Council’s ‘excellence and access’ slogan created ‘a false dichotomy’ (quoted in Sinclair 1995: 227). Within British cultural policy discourse there has long been an assumption that these two priorities are necessarily in tension, if not in outright opposition.

It is a part of this tension on which Andrew Ormston picks up when considering one of the major structural changes imposed in England after the 2010 General Election, which saw the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council dismantled and its responsibilities allocated to Arts Council England. Ormston, a former cultural services director in various authorities, sees libraries as an exceptionally important part of the cultural portfolio with an evolving social role at both local and national level. The change takes ‘a service based on principles of universal access into a service based on principles of patronage, so chalk and cheese’ (Ormston 2014: 20). From such a perspective, ACE is culturally incompatible with the founding principles of library services, and it is on this account that Ormston has concern for their future.44 Such an anxiety is perhaps given substance by Cluny Macpherson’s experience as a recent Regional Director for Arts Council England, which supports the perception found in

44 Ormston compares this with the difficulties at Creative Scotland, which he relates in part to an attempt ‘to bang the Film Council and the Arts Council together’ (Ormston 2014: 20); there is a similarity in terms of creating a clash of organisational culture, but different combinations of remit are part of an expanding gap between England and Scotland in terms the funding system’s political and cultural character.

109 some policy analysis that, in spite of the supposed shift towards participatory and inclusive work within the arts system under New Labour, little of substance really changed in terms of institutional attitudes (Jancovich 2011). Macpherson expresses ‘frustration’ about the lack of interest shown by senior policy makers at ACE in community participation and also young people’s work (Macpherson 2014: 4). ‘High art’ remained the priority, whether ‘critically engaged practice in the visual arts or the western classical canon’ and Macpherson saw a lack of balance at senior level between ‘people’s experience and perspectives … and the value they put on them’ (ibid.).

The extent to which cultural activity is understood to be valued in society at large is another significant contextual factor for cultural managers and policy makers at local, national and international level. Macpherson’s experience at ACE contrasts with his local authority role where the polarity of art and community values is largely reversed. Now, he finds, people will say ‘why on earth are you giving money to classical music, they won’t get that, but they’ll fight tooth and nail to make sure there’s still … the provision of music teaching in their local school’ (ibid. 6). The transition of another ex- ACE interviewee, Janet Archer, to a new national context reveals other differences. For Archer, this is the happy experience of finding ‘an inherent sense of value for arts and culture in Scotland’ which contrasts with her previous experience (Archer 2014b: 6). She quotes the example of attending a meeting of the Scottish Leaders’ Forum, involving the heads of various public sector bodies, and being met with an ‘amazing show of hands’ when she asked her audience how many of them sat on arts boards: ‘the arts are part of public life in a very, very connected way’ (ibid.). She admits that this doesn’t necessarily translate into policy, but argues that it does create a very different environment in which to advocate and organise. Julie Ward, meanwhile, describes how the Committee on Culture and Education of the European Parliament is seen as peripheral by many MPs and MEPs, but became a ‘battle ground’ during 2014 following a UKIP attack on the Erasmus and European Action programmes (Ward 2014: 5). It was also embroiled in controversy surrounding the appointment of Hungary’s Tibor Navracsics as the responsible European Commissioner.45

45 Navracsics, part of Hungary’s ruling Fidesz party and Prime Minister Victor Orbán’s choice as European Commissioner, was initially selected as European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Citizenship by Juncker in 2014 but was rejected by the Culture and Youth committee on account of Fidesz’s record on press freedom (https://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/viktor-orbns-butler- will-not-serve-in-eu-education-role/2016211.article). The appointment was later ratified but with the

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Ward argues that there is an important lesson here for those politicians who denigrate the cultural portfolio, because ‘it was a debate and discussion that was about values. Really important values. And it wasn’t happening in any other committee, it was happening in the culture committee’ (ibid.). This provides an empirical instance of how culture, as a site of contention for meaning and identity, may be an underrated part of how European politics can be reimagined (Gielen & Lijster 2015).

These few experiences illustrate an enormous diversity of the roles and valuations of culture in different political and social contexts. They outline a dynamic relationship in terms of the place of culture in public life, where culture can be a powerful vehicle for social action and development, while its political and public status limits the degree to which this potential can be fulfilled. Influence can be brought to bear on this equation both from within and outside of the cultural sector, whether at local or European level. However, with the interpretation of culture being so varied, making the case for its value in any of these arenas remains, as Macpherson puts it, ‘unfortunately complex rather than refreshingly simple’ (Macpherson 2014: 6).

Common to many of these diverse reflections on value is that principles can become meaningless without the ability to communicate them. Particularly in areas of collaborative artistic creation, where joint action aims at an as yet unknown outcome, sustaining the process depends on common understanding of certain standards: aesthetic, ethical, organisational. Such values are a framework for mutual dependence. Jane Spiers reports that during the process of establishing company themes at Aberdeen Performing arts, the word ‘honesty’ came up more than any other; after much discussion, this was translated into their first company theme, ‘loyalty’ (Spiers 2014: 4).46 At Space 2, meanwhile, communities and participants are considered to be at the heart of the work and this area of value appears as inseparable from the company’s identity:

So, we’re not a ‘parachute in’ kind of company, we kind of go in for the long haul. It’s about building trust and building relationships. It all comes back to citizenship responsibility removed. The role itself was seen in Hungary as pointedly low ranking: http://hungarianfreepress.com/2014/09/10/navracsics-eu-appointment-is-a-slap-in-the-face-for-orban- regime/. It is telling that the award of a cultural portfolio can be interpreted as a calculated political insult on the international stage. 46 The others were optimism, curiosity, resilience and teamwork.

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being about people… I don’t know whether you call that a value, or an approach. It’s part of being us, at least. (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 5)

4.4.3. A question of trust

Several interviewees demonstrate how these processes around company values and building a shared vision centre ultimately on an idea of trust. At one level, as Jane Spiers points out, this is about the effective functioning of a business, where it must be possible to have confidential conversations and deal appropriately with sensitive information (Spiers 2014: 8). There is a clear link between the values of trust and loyalty, and within the context of an organisation these apply to relationships with artists, audiences and participants as much as to members of staff or board members. However, it is noticeable that trust was most often flagged as an issue by interviewees when discussing relationships that bridged different contexts: between funders and funded organisations, or between cultural and non-cultural sector organisations or representatives – areas where a want of mutual understanding, or the perception that the other side speaks a different language, can breed suspicion.

Those who themselves have crossed the poacher/gamekeeper divide between arts practitioner and funding chief are quick to identify the credibility and licence granted by having both forms of experience. Janet Archer, known as a dancer and choreographer in Scotland before returning as Creative Scotland’s Chief Executive, refers to her long standing relationships with many Scottish artists: ‘when I first came here, people said “we trust you, because you’re one of us”’ – she has ‘gone through the same journey’ (Archer 2014b: 10). Cluny Macpherson, similarly, feels that ‘I’m reasonably part of their world, because I’ve experienced some of that’ (Macpherson 2014: 3). This is not just about being granted trust from the outset, but also about being able to translate between policy and practice, dismantling the barrier of language:

So I sort of jokingly say to people, when I was running a band, what I never really did is … created a strategic business plan with outcomes, names and ambitions in order to increase our sustainability over the long term, reflecting

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the different needs of blah blah blah. What I did was try and ring people up to get more gigs. (ibid.)

As in other areas of life, trust is a two way street. Archer, conscious that she was coming into a situation where trust in her organisation had very publicly broken down, describes moving quickly to set up a sector reference group and other forms of consultation ahead of developing a new Creative Scotland plan. This process ‘helped the guardianship of that plan being produced… I think that gave folk out there a bit of confidence … that we were trusting of the sector voices, in respect of what we were doing’ (Archer 2014b: 5). With reference to the original crisis, Roanne Dods (2014: 5) recalls applying the perspective of the Artist as Leader ‘lens’ to understand what had been missing – which, as far as she was concerned was Creative Scotland being interested in the idea of artists leading, or trusting them to do so. It was therefore necessary for the new leadership to reach out to the sector first and demonstrate respect for its expertise before there could be a possibility of trust being reciprocated.

Dods further reflected, in relation to her experience as the original Director of the Jerwood Foundation, on the skills and intelligence needed to run grant schemes within strategic organisations, and the necessary role of integrity and trust in funding relationships (ibid.). This principle reappears in different ways among other funders. Macpherson observes the relative difficulty of proceeding in this way within the service culture of a local authority, which is about ‘procurement’ of outcomes, compared to his Arts Council experience, where money is granted ‘on the basis of ideas’ and ‘the parameters are there but not the specifics’ (Macpherson 2014: 6). At European level, a leading funding official like Barbara Gessler is quick to emphasise the importance of instrumental outcomes such as relevance to the Europe 2020 economic strategy in justifying the cultural budget (Gessler 2014: 13). However, she is also well aware that:

There’s not a direct return on investment if you invest in the culture sector. I don’t think that’s different at the European level than it is from other national sectors, or regional or local… if we believe that a strong creative sector is important for Europe, because it also has an impact on other policy areas –

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innovative, education and all these things – then we’re doing something for ourselves; but only in the mid and in the long term. This money is for the sector. (Gessler 2014: 8)

For this reason she defends the Culture Programme as being very open and non- prescriptive in terms of project content. This does not, of course, mean any lack of paperwork, guidelines, contracts and, potentially, sanctions for non-delivery. Like any big public programme the Commission’s cultural agency finds itself ‘between the trust and the proper implementation’, in Gessler’s phrase (ibid.). Such an institution, in trying to serve a constituency as disparate and amorphous as the European cultural sector, takes on an almost absurd challenge in trying to develop any meaningful reciprocal relationship of trust and confidence; the inevitable gap is perhaps what some of the many European cultural networks and advocacy organisations are trying to fill. What is interesting is that, even at this level, trust is understood as vital oil in the machinery and, at least theoretically, as an ingredient without which publicly funded projects cannot achieve their potential. More obviously, it is just as important for artists and cultural organisations themselves to develop trust and relationships amongst their sector’s agencies and funders. As Macpherson (2014: 9) admits, ‘it’s much easier to… cut or not fund an organisation where you’ve never met the people, you don’t understand the nuance of their work’.

Relationships across different sectors can seem just as remote, even without geography distance. Andrew Ormston discusses the value of the brokerage role that can be played by the cultural sector or within local authorities in connecting private sector developments, particularly in urban contexts, with cultural initiatives. Ormston recounts the example of a £3m public art scheme produced with developers Hammersons at the Oracle Centre in Reading, where at the end of the process ‘they basically said, we do this because there is a team of people… who we absolutely trust to deliver’ (Ormston 2014: 6). The developers were able to have confidence that the arts team at the Council understood their needs and were dependable, ‘making those partnerships right, and getting the aspirations right’ (ibid.). The possible spheres of action for cultural initiatives, not to mention the available resources, are frequently located outside the immediate networks and infrastructure of the cultural sector; here, cross-contextual communication abilities and fundamental standards of professional reliability again demonstrate their value. One of Ormston’s concerns is where this kind

114 of brokerage capacity can be found now that public sector resources and expertise have been pared back. Closer involvement of the cultural sector is one possibility: ‘maybe artists do have to be a bit more switched on… because there isn’t necessarily that much there between them and the developer, and the process’ (ibid. 7).

Dawn Fuller, from the perspective of a small arts organisation at the other end of the strategic scale, has also noticed the opening up of this kind of gap. Referring to the former role of city-wide collaborative forums in Leeds, she remarks: ‘You know those moments where people come together and you get so much more? They’re not happening … there is no leadership there that … has the capacity or that isn’t tied by other agendas’ (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 15). Emma Tregidden stresses that it is the cross-sectoral encounter facilitated by these platforms which is valuable, rejecting ‘boring talk’ which opposes the arts to ‘other silos’ and proposing that ‘… we need to be around those tables with … the good, the bad and the ugly as well, that aren’t in the arts or the cultural sector’ (ibid.). If no-one is now going to convene these tables on the sector’s behalf, this suggests an increased need for cultural professionals to understand, reach out and be able to relate to a wider range of professional disciplines.

Trust, finally, appears as a fundamental value for the Clore Leadership Programme. For Sue Hoyle this is rooted in the selection process and individuals’ self-assessment of their needs and capacities. Hoyle relates this to the need for potential leaders to be able to learn from others: ‘our whole process is based on trust. That people are open and honest about who they are, and what they don’t know as well as what they do’ (Hoyle 2014b: 5). This quality of self-awareness and openness to the capacities of other can be related to all of these ways in which cultural sector leaders need to be able to develop trust in cross-contextual relationships, within and outwith their own sector. Expertise sometimes consists of knowing where else to find it.

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4.5. Relating to policy

4.5.1. Politicians and political influence

Publicly funded cultural activity is unavoidably connected with political life, most obviously through the need to justify subsidy, but also in terms of the wider connections to civil life sustained by many cultural organisations. By some standards, these are the hallmarks of leadership: ‘if you think about the artistic leaders that you kind of respect, or tend to be highest profile… they have usually adopted a sort of civil society-ish kind of role’ (Ormston 2014: 10). In any case, most of the interviewees are (or have been) required to ‘make the case’ for culture in one form or other, with this phrase appearing as a regular shorthand for the necessary process of financially- driven advocacy, usually constructed in terms borrowed from another area of policy (Matarasso 2013: 17; Archer 2014b: 10; Macpherson 2014: 2). Anyone involved in doing so is necessarily engaging with the ‘positive’ tradition of culture in public life (Belfiore & Bennett 2007; see 3.5.1 above).

All the interviewees have been connected with public funding for culture in some way during their careers, but only the current public sector managers (Archer, Gessler, Macpherson, Pasquali) have roles predominantly defined by it. Someone like James Marriott, who describes himself as working ‘at the fringe of political acceptability’ (Marriott 2013: 6) tries to avoid being compromised by it; others (Rossello, Hoyle) work within organisations whose main revenue comes from other sources. The arts organisation leaders (including Marriott; also Brining, Fuller & Tregidden, Spiers, Watson) describe a mix of subsidy, private giving and earned income, broadly recognisable as the classic British ‘three-legged stool’ of funding - albeit a rather baroque version, with legs of different lengths and splintered forms.47 Those now working predominantly in freelance roles (Dods, Fremantle, Glass, Matarasso, Ormston) tend to have variable relationships to public funding depending on individual

47 Subsidy sources mentioned by interviewees include the expected Arts Council and Lottery funds but also EU grants, local health initiatives, and education budgets and national research grants. Private funds range from major trusts and foundations to individual donors with motivations including the environment, human rights and social justice. Earned income includes not only ticket sales and merchandise but also royalties, rights, consultancy and commissions. As Stark and Gordon (2010: 3.b.i.7) have commented: ‘the promotion - by Arts & Business - of the idea that the economy of (most) arts organisations is now characterised by 33% public sector, 33% earnings and 33% private sources is, at best, disingenuous.’

116 contracts. Many have had roles both as applicants and decision makers, sometimes occupying them simultaneously in different parts of their professional life. At least two (Richard and Ward) have been active politicians as well as running arts organisations and occupying governance roles on funding organisations. These overlapping professional roles create a governance system which is, as Andrew Ormston has described it in his blog, ‘more like a game of Twister’ than a ladder of participatory progression (Ormston 2015).

Negotiating the unwritten rules of this game, and striking the right poses without excessive contortion, is a key area in which cultural leaders must exercise their principles and their judgement. James Brining (West Yorkshire Playhouse) describes the difficulty of projecting a personal political identity when operating as ‘the visible spokesperson for this organisation that needs to be able to get confidence of councillors, business people, people who run schemes for young people… and young people themselves’ (Brining 2014: 7). In trying not to ‘alienate’ people he can end up feeling ‘blunted’ (ibid.). Brining contrasts his position to another Leeds based director, the overtly political Allan Lane (Slung Low theatre company), perceiving the smaller organisation to permit a more integrated position: ‘his political values and his aesthetic and cultural values are very close together’ (ibid.). Similarly, Jane Spiers notes that ‘even if you wanted to take a stand… in my position, where I have a number of paymasters… with the Politics with a big ‘P’, you can’t. You can get involved in politics which are around environmental issues’ (Spiers).48

For Andrew Ormston, however, the responsibility to play a civic role means that the divide between personal and organisational politics needs to be overcome. If a leader hedges on taking a political stance then ‘that’s not leadership in that case. The leadership is actually dealing with that’ (Ormston 2014: 12). Other interviewees share this concern over needing to lead assertively and to defend principled positions but are also concerned to avoid alienating people (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 14). However, there are no recipes for how such a balance can be achieved. More than any other area this appears to rely on intangible qualities like judgement of interpersonal dynamics, sensitivity to individual situations and depth of personal conviction. As Ormston acknowledges: ‘it’s difficult … everything’s negotiated all the time’ (2014:12).

48 A comment which suggests that many arts projects constructed around environmental issues may be playing much safer, in terms of relying on consensus politics, than they’d like to make out.

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The risks range from the possibility of damaging key relationships and funding prospects to the perhaps more insidious numbing-down of self-censorship.

These articulations tend to show cultural leaders grappling with anticipatory responses to possible rather than actual political pressure. If discursive practices can ‘administer silences’ (Foucault 1979: 12) then leaders’ expectations of the wider political environment in which they are required to operate may be significant for their practice. One major issue during the period of this research has been the Scottish independence debate and the extent to which culture policy could be used as to wield influence in the referendum. During the last few years, the SNP led Scottish government has created ‘a stark political contrast’ (Ormston 2014: 19) between the Holyrood and Westminster positions on culture, encapsulated in a 2013 speech by Scottish Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop rejecting the UK government’s demands for culture to be justified in terms of economic growth (Hyslop 2013). Would the Scottish government instead pressurise the cultural sector to demonstrate distinct ‘Scottishness’ as a reinforcement of national identity? For Janet Archer at Creative Scotland the answer is an emphatic no: ‘the press are playing maverick with it at the moment, but the reality is that the government would not tell us what to do’ (Archer 2014b: 7). She gives credit to Hyslop for respecting the arm’s length principle and knowing that ‘the most interesting art comes out of a voice which is free to speak about that which it believes in, not that which it is told to do’ (ibid.). This may be true, yet producer Suzy Glass tells the story of Away with the birds, a project with artist Hanna Tuulikki, a project extending over ‘weeks and weeks… years actually’ which includes a short but ‘very Scottish’ vocal performance (Glass 2013: 2). This, within the political context, is being promoted and perceived as the essence of the whole programme of work: ‘and because of that, I guess then we’re pushed towards output and production as the driving force, and it seems to be the wrong way round to me’ (Glass 2013: 2). There may be no intervention within content, but other acts of selection, presentation and political storytelling strongly affect the overall discourse and therefore the cultural reception of creative work, if not its production.

There is a more clearly legitimate role for politicians in debating the civil society role of publicly funded culture. Andrew Ormston (2014: 8), considering the pros and cons of the arm’s length principle, suggests that ‘yes, it means arm’s length from political interference, but it also means arm’s length from democratic process’. Put another

118 way, if cultural organisations are too remote from political dialogue and civil society concerns, then they risk losing the democratic mandate implicit in the funding that they receive. By way of a final contortion in the Twister game, this also requires politicians to remember that cultural professionals are themselves political stakeholders. As Dawn Fuller complains of city councillors and local strategy:

… they do that whole thing about, “well you’re a third sector organisation, you need to be delivering what we’re doing because of our constituents” – and it’s like, hang on a minute, I’m one of them – I’m also a voter here. (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 14)

If a significant part of the function of cultural leadership is to inject dynamism into the triangular relationship between the cultural sector, the state and the public, then it is a function which can be served from any one of those three directions.

4.5.2. Advocacy

Fuller’s assertion of her significance as a voter is reinforced by French artist, organiser and sometime politician Ferdinand Richard, for whom ‘appropriation by the population’ of cultural action is essential for putting pressure on elected individuals by relating the issue to their vote. In Richard’s estimation, ‘if we are not in this power struggle, we don’t count for nothing’ (Richard 2014: 5). At the end of the day, and whatever level of arm’s length protection prevails, politicians hold ultimate sway over the scale and status of publicly funded culture because they approve the budgets. At national level, the rise and fall of Arts Council fortunes in relation to successive UK governments and phases of cultural policy suggests that political belief and financial support are linked like the moon and the tide.

However, the dedicated national support administered by the Arts Councils is only one of 27 sources of arts funding identified in Christopher Gordon and Peter Stark’s DCMS Select Committee paper (2010: 3.b.i.7). While accurate and directly comparable annual figures are hard to come by, local authority expenditure on the arts was for many years estimated as roughly equivalent to Arts Council spend (Hewison 2014: 14-

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15). This balance appears to be shifting in a climate of shrinking local authority budgets and decreasing capacity for non-statutory spend, but combined direct expenditure on the arts by local authorities in England and Wales for 2014-15 is still estimated at over £200m (Arts Development: UK & Arts Council of Wales 2015: 2).49 To put this in some perspective, Arts Council England spend on National Portfolio Organisations (including Museums) totalled £334m in the same year (Arts Council England 2015b). It is not just national politicians, then, whose influence counts, or who need in turn to be influenced by the cultural sector’s own advocates. However, it is not clear that other political roles are taken sufficiently seriously. Cluny Macpherson has noticed, on moving from Arts Council England to a city council, that his involvement with local politicians in the creation and interpretation of policy is far more substantial than expected: ‘they’re very important people in terms of the relative priority of arts and culture within the local authority and what gets supported and what doesn’t’ (Macpherson 2014: 4). He sees this role as poorly understood within the sector, noting that, as a senior officer, cultural organisations in Leeds will ‘probably have me … on invite lists’ but that ‘they overestimate my influence and underestimate that of politicians’ (ibid. 7). At European level, Barbara Gessler makes a similar observation, suggesting that someone like Luca Bergamo (Secretary General of advocacy organisation Culture Action Europe) should be talking to colleagues in the European Commission rather than herself at the Executive Agency, ‘because they are the ones making the policy’ (Gessler 2014: 6). She also believes that ultimately it is only the cultural sector itself, together with representatives of the member states, that can hold strategic organisations like the Commission accountable for their obligations (ibid. 4).

Macpherson is concerned that the sector is frequently absent from significant processes to the detriment of future prospects. He illustrates this by describing a meeting about rural policy for Yorkshire which aimed at setting regional priorities for European regeneration funding. He set off prepared to impress policy makers with the key fact that ‘in North Yorkshire there’s more people working in the creative industries than there are in agriculture’ (ibid. 8). However, of 300 or so attending the meeting itself, two thirds were from the agriculture sector and just eight from the cultural sector. ‘And I thought, ok, here’s a sector – agriculture – who understands what this is about,

49 This follows a decline in local authority investment from the previous year estimated at 6.3% (Arts Development: UK & Arts Council of Wales 2015: 6).

120 understands that they need to be in those rooms… and here is a cultural sector that doesn’t’ (ibid.).

In Macpherson’s experience such shortcomings relate to a lack of understanding, or disinterest, ‘in the needs and views of people outside the arts sector’ (ibid. 4). Others evidence similar concerns. Julie Ward notes a reluctance within the sector to listen to those with dissenting voices, particularly but not exclusively young people, and appeals for this to change: ‘so we keep talking to ourselves … let’s widen that circle, actually. Invite some new people in’ (Ward 2014: 13). Andrew Ormston, meanwhile, perceives an advocacy vacuum at the top level, particularly in England, which is a result of structural changes in the sector:

Because, what have we got right now in terms of cultural leadership in the highest sense … influencing national policy, influencing national businesses, national figureheads, investment, etc. etc.? What does that look like right now? Because we’ve seen the disappearance of a lot of institutions, or influence of institutions and NGOs. (Ormston 2014: 15)

In Ferdinand Richard’s view this form of advocacy and leadership is urgently needed because the existing framework for cultural policy and funding is old, dusty and in need of overhaul in many countries. This requires conversations in the public realm about values and what culture is for. It requires a ‘long haul’ process of ‘changing the mentality, talking to the politicians, left and right … you have to change the paradigm. It’s difficult’ (Richard 2014: 7-8).

What emerges from these comments is a shared sense at different levels (European, national, city and regional) of there being something missing from the cultural sector’s capacity to articulate itself effectively in relation to external interests and influences. This is both about being effective for your practice or organisation and about working in the long term interest of your cultural form or sector. The applicability of the ‘long haul’ approach at local level is confirmed by Macpherson. Civil society involvement and ‘bottom up advocacy’ meet in the need to ‘be around those debates’ rather than just pursuing immediate self-interest:

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Not just ring up your local Councillor the day before your grant’s gone in… you need to have known them two years ago, before they were elected, and warm them up, and meet them on their ground and be part of the things they’re engaged with on a day to day basis. (Macpherson 2014: 7)

A strong sense emerges from the interviews of the need for cultural sectoral advocacy to be understood not merely as a set of communication skills and arguments, but as a product of committed engagement with other sectors and spheres of action. It is embodied as a willingness to contribute as much as an ability to persuade.

4.5.3. Funding

I think everyone’s looking for that ultimate business model … where you can deliver great art and drive the creative industries with a better balance of public resources and income from other resources. (Archer 2014b: 7)

Janet Archer sums up a complex challenge facing many artists and leaders of cultural organisations. She is referring specifically to Scotland but her comment can equally be applied to the rest of the UK and to most countries in Europe. It contains within it two notable tensions: between the aesthetic aims of producing great art and the economic outcome of creative industry success; and between the pursuit of public and other resources, with an implied value judgement that a reduced proportion of the former and increase in the latter is ‘better’. This is not to suggest that a seasoned Arts Council manager like Archer is anything other than committed to the principle and role of cultural funding, but it does reflect the terms of a dominant discourse in public sector management around the inevitability of lowering subsidy. Both tensions can be related to the competing interpretations of ‘autonomy’ identified by Pascal Gielen and Thijs Lijster in debates on cultural policy across Europe, in which the neo-liberal defenders of cutbacks argue ‘that artists and cultural institutes should learn to stand on their own feet and become less dependent on subsidies’ whereas their opponents maintain that ‘art and culture should be able to operate independent of the markets’ (Gielen & Lijster

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2015: 45). Bondage to the state or slavery to the market: take your pick. While this bipolar argument continues to play out in the politics of state intervention, most interviewees’ experience is of negotiating their position in a mixed economy and this gives rise to a number of more nuanced issues.

The changed dynamics of subsidy are certainly recognised as fact by James Marriott, but his concern is not so much for the independence of culture from the markets or the economics of public taste but in relation to less transparent agendas of private sponsors. Marriott sees in this a fundamental question of whose values we want public cultural institutions to represent:

… the nature of financing of culture is shifting radically and will continue to shift radically … the question that we constantly need to ask is what is the world that you want to create – is it a world in which public culture is always provided from the arm of private profit making corporate concerns, is that what you want, you know? (Marriott 2013: 13)

Financial independence from the state can also be associated with preserving an uncompromised critical position. Julie Ward illustrates this with the example of the Panda performing arts network in the north-west of England, which has actively chosen not to apply for Arts Council NPO status and ‘made an absolutely clear decision that they think they can be more effective outside of that core funded situation’ (Ward 2014: 11). Ward and Marriott are both concerned with the potential for artists and cultural organisations to maintain a radical autonomous voice, but indicate a parallel potential for this to be threatened by dependence either on public or private resources. Parallel, but not necessarily equal: an important difference for Marriott is that the public accountability of organisations such as the Arts Council make it possible to critique them while still receiving funding in a way that is impossible with sponsors (Marriott 2013: 19).50

50 In this Marriott is very close to the arguments against arts sponsorship made by Raymond Williams in his 1989 essay Politics and policies: the case of the Arts Council, where he objected that commercial sponsors get ‘a low-cost ride’ on the back of public funding and that ‘public relations calculations’ result in the ‘deformation of the arts’ (Williams 2007: 146-7). Williams advocated that sponsorship should be kept out of the arts entirely and, in another essay (Culture and Technology), scorned the ‘figleaf terms’ of ‘sponsorship’ and the ‘mixed economy’ as cover for reduction of the public sector (2007: 126). >>

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Actual reductions in state subsidy certainly produce an increased desire for relative economic autonomy for the simple reason that reliance on it becomes more stressful and precarious. Marriott has himself experienced this, having witnessed the struggles of an older generation of artists who became used to regular Arts Council grants in the 1970s and were ‘blown out of the water’ in Thatcher era: ‘I remember looking at them and thinking, I do not want to do that ... If the Arts Council choose to give us some money at some time, great, if they don’t, we can survive without it’ (Marriott 2013: 5). Roanne Dods, meanwhile, has noticed a greater emphasis on income generation and digital agility among producers since the 2008 financial crisis and ‘all of that real shift in policy … because not least our young and emerging producers are really desperate not to be dependent on solely public funding’ (Dods 2014: 3). This does reflect a push towards the market, but also suggests interplay between technical developments and changes in funding with evolving implications for organisational models. Even where public funding remains available, as Andrew Ormston observes, ‘money is made available for different criteria, for different reasons, at different times, so people chase it … so that can lead to a short term kind of approach to things’ (Ormston 2014: 3). The ability to relate to different public agendas, not just the external market, is becoming more important.

All of these pressures concentrate the challenge for individuals and organisations of remaining focused on their core values and purposes. From the perspective of a socially engaged, community focused arts organisation, Emma Tregidden sees a key part of her task as translating short term funding into long term relationships. Some financial opportunities may only produce a month’s worth of money but become part of a complex patchwork: ‘you go back to the participants. We don’t think of them on a four week basis. We don’t do anything on a four week basis’ (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 18). Fuller and Tregidden try to pursue two or three year funding bids where possible but ideal options are not always available. Matching the slow and deliberate measure of investment in individuals at community level to the irregular pulse of political and financial opportunism produces the distinctive rhythm of their organisation. It

>> Arguably, the supposed necessity of sponsorship has since become orthodoxy within UK cultural policy discourse and was an agenda pushed strongly by the DCMS under the Coalition government from 2010. Marriott and Platform take a noticeably rare stance in resisting its effects; Williams’s position is a reminder that it was not always thus.

124 exemplifies the kind of adaptation and translation processes necessary to sustain an operation for which the ‘ultimate business model’ is likely to remain elusive. The inventiveness produced through such scenarios is of no surprise to Ferdinand Richard, for whom cultural activity is ‘like water. Water always finds its way’ (Richard 2014: 5). Like Roanne Dods, he sees young people in particular generating new ways of sustaining cultural work without traditional forms of support:

… there are new types of initiatives, like FabLabs, collaborative platforms, incubators … which very often do not work with public money and work on very small scales. It’s the places where young creative people want to go. So, for me, the answer is to multiplicate without public money, or another type of public money. (Richard 2014: 5)

Times of change are likewise challenging for strategic organisations. The extent to which funders themselves are able to respond creatively to new circumstances is a further measure of the cultural sector’s capacity to relate to the future as opportunity rather than threat. As large organisations anchored by longstanding methodological habits, however, their relative manoeuvrability can be a considerable limiting factor. Both Dods and Cluny Macpherson acknowledge the perception of inertia within some funding programmes which seem to continually replicate the same portfolio. From a city council perspective, Macpherson sees that one compensation of straitened circumstances is the opportunity to challenge such habits and review old structures: ‘there’s an argument which says actually those changes are easier when budgets are diminishing, and change is forced upon local government, than it is in the good times’ (Macpherson 2014: 7). Dods regrets the ‘stuck’ nature of some funders, particularly, as of 2014, Arts Council England (Dods 2014: 5). She also sees potential for better communication between funders, particularly among trusts and foundations whose private and autonomous status can get in the way of sharing information or working collaboratively for wider sectoral benefit (ibid.). This begs further questions about the extent to which funding organisations themselves operate as a network or community to consider what they aim at through policy and how effective various approaches may be in producing intended outcomes. The importance of such questions is compounded by resource limitations and a context of diminishing funding as well as by the continual

125 diversification of contemporary cultural activity. Commenting specifically on the European programmes, Arnaud Pasquali puts this dilemma in perspective:

You have €100M per year for the Media Programme; you have €50M, more or less, for the Culture side. On one side you have one focused sector, which is the film industry, and the audio-visual industry at large; on the other side you have a multiplicity of sectors. (Pasquali 2014: 2)

The complexity of the cultural sector contributes to the sense ever present in cultural policy discourse that there is never enough money to go round.

For all these reasons funding is, unsurprisingly, a constantly recurring topic in discussions with cultural professionals. For many in the sector it is the main tangible incarnation of policy, and of course no organisation can function without coherent financial management, whatever their relationship to public funding per se. Moreover, as the literature of the time made clear, issues around governance and the ability of organisations to manage resources reliably were key parts of the original concern for UK cultural leadership (Hewison & Holden 2002; Hewison 2004). However, in setting the agenda for cultural leadership, that particular crisis may have overdetermined the subsequent discourse, which has remained focused on the capacities of organisational leaders in companies or institutions engaged in producing cultural output. Other forms of strategic leadership - the processes through which the circumstances of cultural production are shaped - are excluded. Detailed critique of funders is sometimes available in terms of analysis of resource distribution and the overall principles of their work, particularly in England (Stark, Powell & Gordon 2013; 2014a; 2014b; 2015), but more attention could be paid to the abilities, techniques and models at the disposal of those trying to realise policy objectives through programme design and fund management. Within the present discourse, cultural leaders lead their organisations while cultural policy makers and funders make policy and funding decisions - as if making policy and allocating resources were not themselves acts of leadership, and as if there was no common interest in addressing the economic and aesthetic tensions underpinning decision making throughout the sector.

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4.5.4. The legacy of managerialism

One barrier to funders and producers feeling like they are on the same side in responding to change is the perception that funders are policing their side of the relationship with targets and reporting requirements as a product of ‘managerialism’ (Ormston 2014: 14) or ‘new public management’ (Matarasso 2013: 12), an approach to government driven (in theory) by value for money and characterised by ‘extended forms of performance management’ and ‘organizational control’ (Hoggett 1997: 419). This approach was increasingly adopted within UK government during the 1980s and 1990s and became closely associated with the New Labour administration, although it was inherited from its Conservative predecessors (Hewison 2014: 15-17). To this Matarasso traces ‘the explosion of targets and monitoring and evaluation and all of that, which we all now live with’, citing John Myserscough’s (1988) report on The economic importance of the arts in Great Britain as an early response to the rising demand for evidence (Matarasso 2013: 12). Part of the cultural sector’s difficulty with this is the equation of value with quantitative evidence:

I think the problem was that it quite quickly morphed into that mantra: “if you treasure it, measure it” was the phrase, wasn’t it? And my phrase would be: just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you have to treasure it. (Ormston 2014: 14)

Another problem, as Matarasso points out (2013: 12), is that it became ‘politically misused as a system of enforcement, not as a system of developing understanding and knowledge’. It is this that leaches trust from the relationship between the funder and the funded. To recognise this is not to reject the value of good quality information and the need to account for public expenditure. Matarasso (ibid.), Ormston (2014: 15) and Jane Spiers (2014: 19) all take care to acknowledge the importance of genuine evaluation, of understanding impact, and generating positive contributions to public policy. They are realistic that, for funders, ‘there’s always an agenda’ (ibid. 18)’ and that ‘the perfect patron, who doesn’t want any kind of instrumentality, does not exist’ (Ormston 2014: 14). Their critique is of the way information has been used, especially when it leaves out ‘the sort of unquantifiable impacts which are much more personal or which relate to revitalising communities’ (Spiers 2014: 19).

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Even if the rules of the game are accepted at face value, they can turn out to be unreliable. Matarasso (2014: 12) warns that, just because you can produce evidence, ‘it doesn’t then follow that government acts on evidence’. Ormston adds the observation that the cultural sector ‘got all our managerialist stuff sorted out just in time for a government that didn’t care very much… and had brought a completely different agenda to the table’ (Ormston 2014: 15). Debates about the value of culture in public life continue at home and abroad (Gielen 2015a; Warwick Commission 2015); these testimonies suggest a contemporary need for cultural advocates both within and outside the funding structures to move past what David Stevenson has called ‘the well- worn discursive knot of the instrumental versus the intrinsic’ (2014: 184) to achieve a much more fluent integration of their values.

4.6. International perspectives

The majority of the research interviewees have direct experience of working outside their home country and almost all have worked with international partners to develop particular strands of activity. International work appeared as important to the processes of cultural leadership in four general ways: firstly, as an area of skill or competence (the ability to work effectively transnationally in recognition of global developments in each cultural form); secondly, as an aspect of international relations (culture employed across borders as a means for political ends); thirdly, as challenge and refreshment (stepping outside national habits and assumptions to find other ways of working); and finally as form of perspective (identifying patterns of change and the emergence of transnational themes that may have significance for policy and practice).

4.6.1. Internationalism as competence

Janet Archer (2014: 5) points out that the need for the sector to function internationally has been included as one of five key themes in Creative Scotland’s current strategic plan, with an ambition that over the next ten years Scotland will be ‘a distinctive creative nation connected to the world’ (Creative Scotland 2014: 17). The inclusion of

128 this statement was a matter of ‘some debate’ but it was concluded that ‘in a demographic the size of Scotland … most people need to have some sort of international business, if they’re operating at scale, as well as local business’ (Archer 2014b: 5). She cites the example of choreographer Marc Brew, who is project funded by Creative Scotland, and the international portfolio of work he has to maintain in order to be able to work year-round. In this case the need to work internationally is presented as a matter of professional survival when working within a highly specialised area with limited available contracts. Also within the dance sector, Sharon Watson describes the establishment of international ‘ambassadors’ for her company, a role fulfilled by ex-Phoenix members (Watson 2014: 4). This is more about the need to be informed and aware of developments in an internationalised practice – a case of artistic rather than economic survival. As Watson puts it: ‘I need to know what’s going on in your country. I need you to be able to feed back. You’re coming back to do work – what do you bring with you as opposed to us just commissioning work?’ (ibid.).

4.6.2. Changing international relations: the case of the British Council

Pablo Rossello is candid about the way in which, for an organisation like the British Council, cultural projects work instrumentally to develop relationships and project a particular national image. In part at least, a programme like Cultural Leadership International ‘was the opportunity to bring UK leaders, cultural leaders, and to give them access to an international network of peers; position the UK as a hub, as a leader in the development of cultural leadership’ (Rossello 2014: 5).51 In spending money on developing non-UK cultural leaders, such programmes also work more subtly to sow seeds for longer term understanding, within or beyond the cultural arena, with an awareness that ‘any one of these participants might be the next Minister of Culture, or the next Prime Minister’ (ibid. 6). This way of operating also facilitates other areas of work, as Rossello confirms: ‘every programme that implies a selection process is a very good mechanism for my projects overseas, to identify people’ (ibid. 9). This creates a kind of symbiotic relationship between local cultural development and the

51 This attitude contrasts with that of Hoyle, who reports being approached to run programmes in other countries but not wanting to impose a model (Hoyle 2014b: 10). Hoyle is obviously involved with advisory work on international cultural leadership programmes but talks about ‘exchange’ rather than ‘export’ (ibid.).

129 wider diplomatic ambitions of the organisation. Ferdinand Richard, from the perspective of a French professional working frequently in the Arab world, notes this approach as a key difference between the British Council and his own country’s Institut français.52 He credits the British Council’s current approach with being ‘much more aware of local cultural development’, acknowledging that while ‘they may have their own agenda … at least they pay attention … they are listening to people, they are trying to help local initiatives’ (Richard 2014: 7). Richard contrasts this with more traditional ways of thinking about ‘global image’ and ‘national sovereignty’ where a country would only promote its own culture (ibid. 7).

Richard here provides external recognition of a conscious shift in approach which the British Council’s Graham Sheffield (Director Arts) has described publicly as ‘convening, not controlling’. Sheffield sets out an approach based on relationships rather than events, promising ‘no more artistic one night stands’ and acknowledging that it is no longer possible to ‘fire your culture at someone like a gun’.53 The British Council is instead recognised in recent policy literature as opening new avenues in cultural diplomacy by exporting models of cultural entrepreneurship and the creative industries rather than simply cultural products (Bell & Oakley 2015: 161-4). To some extent these developments speak of pragmatism as much as any new post-imperial humility. Rossello, asked to comment on Sheffield’s description, admits that the emphasis on networks stems at least in part from financial reality: ‘We have less and less resources to be able to take the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment over to China. We would do something where we provide a space for those members to meet’ (Rossello 2014: 8). Nonetheless, Richard (2014: 6) sees additional potential for these evolving approaches to open up new ways of working through culture on major policy areas such as defence and security where root problems are located in cultural outlook and identity. Whatever the future of such ideas, these perspectives reflect a changing picture of international cultural relations where exchange and expertise are valued over Expo and export. This suggests that different skills are being demanded of those cultural leaders working at international level at the same time as the need to be more internationally connected becomes increasingly felt.

52 Richard is President of the Roberto Cimetta Fund, which supports euro-arab regional mobility amongst artists and individual cultural producers to promote exchange and co-operation (http://www.cimettafund.org/article/index/rubrique/1/lang/fr/fm/1). Richard also views the Goethe Institute as succeeding in changing with the times, in contrast to the Institut français. 53 Unpublished talk at the 2014 Culture Action Europe conference Beyond the Obvious, Sage Gateshead, 10th October (author’s notes).

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4.6.3. Other methods

Opening up other outlooks and ways of working is part of the fascination of international cultural exchange as well as being a practical matter of gaining information and know-how. For Julie Ward, it is an essential part of the function of culture, contributing to the European Union at a level over and above economic arguments, ‘because it is about a meeting of minds, and it is about exploring what matters to us on a human level, and it is about expressing that through a whole range of different media’ (Ward 2014: 6). In this, Ward adds her voice to those who argue that culture should now be more important at European level rather than less during a period in which multiple political and economic crises have put the whole project of the Union and its institutions under unprecedented strain (see, for example, Braidotti 2015; Gielen & Lijster 2015). Such claims for significance can sound inspirational and clearly aim to challenge the low political status often accorded to culture but this kind of philosophical capital is not easily converted into ready influence. Moreover, the ground is contested: Ward also warns of the ‘skewed view’ of culture taken by sceptic parties who seek to ‘hi-jack’ its value (2014: 7). For some, culture is about asserting rather than addressing or transcending difference. One argument for cultural sector engagement with the political sphere is therefore to head off the least welcome political co-options of culture. To argue for the significance of exploring cultural values at international level should also be to acknowledge both the difficulty of this enterprise and its inherently political nature.

Other interviewees use examples from international contexts to put habitual national preoccupations and assumptions into perspective. Sue Hoyle (2014b: 17) recounts an Egyptian Clore Fellow’s description of how she had to ask the army to provide security for her outdoor festival immediately after the overthrow of President Mubarak. After protracted negotiations the army agreed, and their arrangements allowed organisers an easy monitoring process to calculate festival attendance. ‘I said how can you count 8,000 people? And she said, well, I know that they provided eight tanks, so there must have been 8,000 people’ (ibid.). The Egyptian army uses a fixed ratio. In a similar spirit, Jane Spiers recalls spending a year in Spain shortly after the death of Franco and how the intense atmosphere among young people was stoked with political graffiti, rallies and burning effigies (Spiers 2014: 21). For Hoyle, such vivid examples of the very different realities in which culture is nevertheless produced and promoted

131 elsewhere put hobbyhorse complaints about public finance into a certain perspective: ‘you just think just, stop faffing around worrying about some crisis’ (Hoyle 2014b: 17). She is also concerned that without understanding of different cultures and the issues that they face, UK cultural leaders ‘could become too insular, not very competitive and too narrowly focused’ (ibid. 6). Within the Clore programme, she finds that it has proved particularly valuable to open up perspectives outside of Europe (ibid.). Spiers, meanwhile, sees such encounters as showing up a rather artificial divide between art and politics prevalent in the UK: ‘… in countries like South Africa and Egypt … you can’t distinguish between arts and politics. But in the UK, it’s a bit clinical, isn’t it? It’s a bit like, mm, you don’t do that!’ (Spiers 2014: 21). In both cases, admiration for passion and resourcefulness is apparent and the listener is challenged to imagine how they might cope – let alone thrive – in situations where their usual structures and support systems are stripped away.

4.6.4. Pattern and perspective

One further benefit of working with an international perspective becomes apparent through the interviews, which is the potential to identify trends and larger scale patterns of activity within each professional field so as to be able to understand and anticipate developments. The significance of novelty or difference is more likely to become apparent. Arnaud Pasquali, for example, having worked in Media for EACEA before transferring to Culture, has seen how fairly uniform developmental structures apply across different national film and media industries whereas the cultural sector has a much greater diversity of models (Pasquali 2014: 3). This has implications for developing funding instruments which are intended to work systematically for culture, particularly within a smaller overall budget (ibid. 2). Hoyle and Rossello, meanwhile, each comment from their experience on the significance of technological change for cultural production and consumption alike. This has influenced both of their cultural leadership development programmes, with Rossello recognising that ‘there’s an impact of technology in cultural management that we wanted to explore, and no-one that claims to be a cultural leader could ignore’ (Rossello 2014: 4). The new productive possibilities of digital art, blending sectors and art forms and producing ‘multi-platform story telling’ (ibid. 6), produce new resources for content and audience reach

132 simultaneously. Hoyle further affirms that ‘the whole acceleration of digital communications is making a big difference to the place of creativity and culture in the world, and who’s involved and how they’re engaged. Linked to that is an increase in global connectivity’ (Hoyle 2014b: 6). These testimonies outline the extent and significance of technological influence on cultural development, something that operates beyond the control of most cultural sector leaders but with which they cannot help but develop a relationship.

Global events are therefore as much part of the context in which policy makers and organisational leaders operate as their own local and national issues. Political and technological considerations at this level may be a long way outside most cultural leaders’ direct sphere of influence, but they may nonetheless be required to articulate a response and help their communities to make sense of larger scale developments. Particularly in relation to political and social change, this is, perhaps, one distinction of ‘cultural’ leaders compared to other leaders in business, whose professional relationship to global issues might be to manage risk, limit exposure and maintain core function. For a cultural sector whose core is to trade in meaning, the appropriate and responsible approach may be rather to enhance engagement and open up connections. In any case, the interviews support contemporary analyses in identifying the international domain as a vital place to look for ‘new understandings of the role of culture within society, and new rationales for cultural investment’ (Bell & Oakley 2015: 165). As such it appears as an essential dimension in which cultural leadership is required to operate, and perhaps one whose impulses and demands are in the process of intensifying.

4.7. Locating the artist

The Artist as Leader research was, among other things, a reminder not to marginalise the role of the artist in debates about cultural leadership which had originally taken shape with particular concern for the management needs of organisations (Douglas & Fremantle 2009: 5). Nonetheless, it is easy to lose sight of artists and actual practice within theoretical consideration of policy and leadership even when thinking about the supposed role of art and culture in public life. Organisations, institutions, structures,

133 funding and all kinds of political priorities get in the way. The constitution of the interview cohort could itself be critiqued from this point of view, as it did not include current full time practising artists. It had been assembled with a view to including people with multiple perspectives, including those who had at one time or another earned their living as a creative artist, choreographer or performer (including Archer, Hoyle, Macpherson, Richard, Ward and Watson) or whose main role still included specifically artistic responsibilities alongside organisational ones (Brining, Marriott, Tregidden and Watson at a minimum; arguably also the producers Dods, Fremantle and Glass plus the writer Matarasso). However, all of these figures at the time of interview necessarily had other concerns and responsibilities than simply the creative production of their art. Moreover – and even respecting the fact that the topic of ‘cultural’ leadership and the remits of the interviewees go well beyond the arts - direct discussion of creative processes or artistic identity within the interviews is notably rare. The discursive frame of cultural leadership, particularly as it relates to policy, seems to operate in a surprisingly restricted way in terms of how it overlaps with questions of aesthetic theory or creative practice. Still, several of the interviewees’ reflections do offer perspectives on how artists may be positioned in relation to this discourse as they lead within their art form and it is worth drawing out a few of the implications.

4.7.1. Acting in the world

An area of concern for some interviewees is the extent to which artists understand the political circumstances in which they work and the interests at play in the processes surrounding it. Lack of such awareness diminishes the control artists may have on the ethical basis of projects and use made of their work, while it can also undermine the sector’s advocacy and ability to defend its resources. Asked directly if she thinks artists are sufficiently aware of political context, artist-cum-politician Julie Ward is definite:

No, I don’t. I don’t think so … The Culture Action Europe meeting was remarkable for me, because it was the first time in years where there has been

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quite clearly a body of artists who were anxious, perturbed, worried, threatened enough to be vocal about being political. And I’m glad to hear it. 54 (Ward 2014: 14)

Ward advocates both for greater activism in terms of arguing for culture’s role in public life and for ‘true creative engagement in political issues’, for which she proposes Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party as exemplary, and which she opposes to more simplistic ‘issue based work’ (ibid.). François Matarasso (2013: 13-14) instead focuses on the ethical dimension of the awareness he sees as necessary when an artist makes work and enters into relationships with organisations. This is a question of integrity, which:

… becomes then really important if you are an artist, because of the particular power and capacity of the artist to act in the world … it seems to me you should take responsibility for your acts in the world, and consequently you should be self-aware as much as it is possible for you to be. (Matarasso 2013: 14)

An artistic practice should therefore not be separated out from an individual’s other relationships and actions in the world but integrated and accommodated within them. It follows that there must be an awareness and a questioning of the effect that those other relationships and contexts have on the work and its possibilities. Matarasso roots this way of thinking in the outlook of German-born French writer and political scientist Alfred Grosser (ibid. 14-15). He paraphrases Grosser, whose Jewish family fled to France ahead of the Second World War, as denying the possibility of being objective about history of which you are a part, asserting the importance of the difference ‘between those of us who recognise the nature of our subjectivity and the forces that act on it and shape it … and those of us who don’t’ (ibid. 15).55 This suggests a kind of artistic integrity which is not about uncompromising adherence to a fixed outlook but which strives for the form in which its principles can act in the world. If leadership is at one level acting in an exemplary way, the exemplary artist leads by continuing to act even while adjusting to the tensions and compromises inherent in political, economic and social realities - and without collapsing their difficulty through

54 Culture Action Europe is a network and advocacy organisation for arts and cultural policy with members in 24 European countries (www.cultureactioneurope.org). The meeting referred to is the 2014 Beyond the Obvious conference, held in Newcastle and Gateshead, 9-11 October. 55 Matarasso’s reference is to the preface of Grosser’s Le crime et la mémoire (1989).

135 denial, avoidance or surrender. It is perhaps the process that James Marriott somewhat sardonically describes: ‘I think the struggle of making art is the struggle between trying not to compromise but having to compromise, do you know what I mean? [laughs] But it should be a struggle’ (Marriott 2013: 20).

Andrew Ormston also makes a plea for ‘self-awareness’, during a discussion about the pros and cons of the arm’s length principle as a mechanism for cultural policy (Ormston 2014: 8-9). Ormston expressed concern that under the prevailing system in the UK the cultural sector risks becoming a ‘club’ and argues for self-awareness as a protection against exclusivity or remoteness from democratic process (ibid.). This begged a question: who is this self that needs to be aware? Where is a cultural system’s consciousness or vigilance located? In part, according to Ormston’s reply, this has to come from the public, and in part it is a role for professionals within the cultural sector:

I think it’s in its own interests to be very self-aware … if it gets it wrong then the consequences are very bad in terms of investment of the sector, how it’s respected, what it’s allowed to do … So it has its own responsibility to monitor and check that, and it should not be left to the NGO. (Ormston 2014: 10)

Ormston argues that the Arts Council in isolation cannot be expected to monitor its own relationship to government (ibid.). Clearly, this kind of awareness – the understanding of who the cultural system serves, how it relates to the public, what is included and excluded – should be exercised at all levels in the cultural sector, with roles for academia, for public feedback and for self-critical professional leadership in organisations and institutions. Given that the production and distribution of artistic and cultural works remains the sector’s ultimate raison d’être, whatever its other duties and distractions, there is arguably a particular need for artists themselves to develop this awareness and to demand the same kind of integrity of their sector that Matarasso’s formulation demands of them. In practical terms this suggests the importance of artists playing a full part in governance roles in the organisations and processes which shape their work, whether at local, national or international level, and of welcoming the essential subjectivity which they bring.

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4.7.2. Beauty as politics

The subject of aesthetics was not directly approached within the research and interviewees touch upon it only lightly. However, there are several indications of ways in which, for these professionals, aesthetic decisions are inextricably linked with ethical and political positions as well as social identity. They relate to the types of meaning made possible through particular attitudes to artistic production and go further than questions of artistic style or taste. Roanne Dods and Suzy Glass, for example, demonstrate different perspectives on the idea of beauty.56 For Glass the concept is insufficient as a basis for making art: ‘I don’t make things that are beautiful just because they’re beautiful. I don’t work with people who do that thing’ (Glass 2013: 2). She describes her guiding principles instead as ‘about making nourishing work, and that’s about having a reason to do something’ (ibid.). Glass, who had a couple of years’ work lined up at the time of the interview and is able to choose between projects, looks instead for the strength of the underlying concepts: ‘the ideas have to be resonant and they have to be about being alive’ (ibid.). This allows the creation of ‘many different entry points for people’ in the work rather than a single invariable experience, valuing encounters through the website as much as those with the finished installation or gallery piece: ‘the work is as much about the process, and the making and the connections through the making, as it is about the moment that it goes live’ (ibid. 2-3).57 In her disavowal of a solely beauty-based aesthetic Glass prioritises individual experience over the universal, abjuring closed meaning or privileged reading. This can be seen as a form of commitment to cultural democracy – deliberately creating spaces for public involvement and response – expressed through a principled aesthetic standpoint.

Dods also challenges the adequacy of conventional ideas of beauty but seeks to redefine the term for the 21st century rather than to reject it, particularly in terms of expanding its understanding beyond the visual (Dods 2014: 2). Drawing on ideas of

56 These observations are not intended to imply that ‘aesthetics’ consists only of beauty – the Kantian sublime would be at least as important, together with modern anti-aesthetic concepts such as Virno’s ‘dismeasure’ (Gielen 2015b: 160, explored in 5.1.2 below). However, as it happened, none of the interviewees mentioned the sublime. 57 Here Glass was specifically discussing the project Heliotrope, an installation at Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens in November 2012, produced by Trigger (Glass’s former partnership with Angie Bual). The individual effect of its aesthetic approach is well illustrated by an audience member quoted on the project website: ‘As a human experience it stands out. Its artistic nature facilitates a very personal experience’ (http://heliotrope-project.com/).

137 multi-sensory perception and ‘embodied knowledge’ which include not only the five main physical senses but also forms of perception such as balance, Dods recognises that humans ‘perceive beauty in different ways, and different people respond to different kinds of intelligence’ (ibid.). For Dods, one area in which artists lead is through their use of these different intelligences – an area which demands to be better understood (at the time of the interview she was fundraising to research these ideas) and which, in its questioning of how knowledge is formed and accessed, ‘is beauty as politics too. And therefore leading by the aesthetics remains for me really, really important’ (ibid.).

Dawn Fuller takes a more explicitly political position in describing Space 2’s creative process of ‘co-production’ with participants as essentially generating ‘democratic art’ (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 7). Fuller asserts as a point of principle that ‘you don’t have to be an artist to have an artistic voice’ (ibid.), taking it as read that the company’s socially inclusive method will produce unpredictable artistic outcomes and defending an approach in which community engagement and response are understood as part of the aesthetic and, indeed, markers of quality (ibid.). Democracy is beauty, perhaps. In this, Space 2 enact a principle also articulated by François Matarasso, for whom everyone can create art ‘in the same way that we can all speak, more or less … We have agency; and art is one of the ways in which we get agency in the world’ (Matarasso 2013: 13). Matarasso also observes that ‘some of us do it much better than others’ (ibid.), while Fuller and Tregidden will sometimes encounter criticism or slighting of their approach and its results (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 6-7). Democracy is beauty – but is it art? Dods, Glass, Fuller and Matarasso may have very different takes on that question and no doubt their aesthetics vary substantially. However, they all appear to be concerned with the limitations of conventional ideas of beauty and the potential for unique personal experiences of perception to constitute distinct and valuable forms of understanding. In divergent ways, their positions undermine certain assumptions around aesthetic form and artistic presentation, acquiring a political edge through their implicit challenge to the social basis of such conventions.

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4.7.3. Aesthetics and identity: the Phoenix Dance story

For Sharon Watson, aesthetic labelling and categorisation is bound up with identity politics in a much more direct way. Her company, Phoenix Dance Theatre, initially made its reputation as an exclusively black dance organisation. Watson performed with the company during that period but now directs a much more diverse set of international dancers: ‘we use our black history to inform what we do in the future but actually we’re a multi-cultural organisation that continues to work with exceptionally trained performers’ (Watson 2014: 11). Watson has in fact been uncomfortable with the idea of Phoenix being presented or received as a ‘black dance company’ ever since her performing days: ‘my voice on the inside was saying first and foremost we’re a dance company ... that’s what we felt as a group of performers: we were first and foremost a group of contemporary dancers’ (ibid.). Black identity was an important part of the company’s origin but it was also ‘an easy way to be pigeonholed’ and therefore not given the same critical status as other contemporary dance companies (ibid.).

Dawn Fuller and Emma Tregidden both worked at Phoenix previously and also recall this tendency. Tregidden mentions Phoenix as one of the companies that her performers want to emulate in terms of quality and professionalism so as to exceed expectations generated by their community status (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 8). Fuller spots a parallel: ‘When I first knew Phoenix, they were having exactly the same fight. It was, oh, it’s raw energy, but the technique’s not quite there … they weren’t regarded as a high quality dance company’ (ibid.). This tension between energy and technique is a documented feature of Phoenix’s early history, playing out in the press, in relationships with funders, and internally (Adair 2007: 129-131). As the company enters its mid-30s, Watson now delves deep into its history in terms of inviting former associates to make work, investing in a Phoenix archive, and reviving classic pieces (Watson 2014: 14). Her relationship with its history and aesthetic identity is long and complex. Much as she spurns the ‘black dance’ label she is also surprised (or perhaps suspicious) when her own origins are ignored, asking: ‘how can you not see that I am a black artistic director? Or are you choosing not to mention that that is an important part of why Phoenix is still doing what it’s doing?’ (ibid. 11).

The distinctiveness of black identity has no doubt generated substantial interest in Phoenix as a contemporary dance company throughout its history: in marketing terms

139 it is an attractive package, much as Watson may itch to escape the box, and even as she faces a new problem of emerging black dancers becoming conspicuous by their scarcity (ibid. 11-12). It makes sense to exploit the advantages of the company’s image while simultaneously dodging its limitations. Watson ultimately aims to carve out the same creative freedom that any director might seek: ‘to have that option of being able to tap into anything that’s presented to us’ (ibid.). History, social politics and aesthetic ambition are linked together in the balancing act required of the artist and leader looking to achieve this, while Watson’s story begins to open up another sphere of artistic leadership: the organisational.

4.8. Leading cultural organisations

As has already been observed, organisations and institutions occupy a privileged position in the established discourse of cultural leadership, particularly within the UK, given that the initial prescription for leadership development was made quite specifically in response to symptoms of organisational malaise (Hewison 2004). This emphasis is identified by Pablo Rossello as a feature of the government funded Cultural Leadership programme in particular, with ‘someone like Jude Kelly’ becoming the model for leaders able to operate ‘in a massive public institution’. Indeed, Kelly’s is the first face to appear after the title ‘What makes a good cultural leader?’ at the start of the CLP’s smooth promotional DVD produced in the year of its launch (Fernando 2006). For the Clore Leadership Programme, the appropriate balance of emphasis in terms of leadership within organisations and in other settings remains under consideration, as Sue Hoyle acknowledges: ‘I think organisation is a key part but not the only thing we do by any means. This is a really interesting thing … this is something I’m pondering on at the moment’ (Hoyle 2014b: 13). Meanwhile there is evidence from the interviews that the relationship of traditional organisational structures to cultural production and development is subject to increasing question from within the sector.

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4.8.1. Constructed vehicles: purposes and limits of cultural organisations

The interviewees collectively represent wide ranging experience of running diverse cultural companies and institutions across the public, private and voluntary sectors on many different scales. Several of them – particularly, it seems, those now working for the most part independently – express suspicion of the self-replicating nature of many organisational structures. As Suzy Glass puts it, these are ‘the organisations that are capable of being organisations regardless of whether or not they’re making good work’ (2013: 10). Reflecting on her own experience of working within the funding system, Glass is sharply critical of the intense waste of effort which goes into preserving bodies that have outlived their useful purpose:

That was one of the main things I came away from the Arts Council with: that this is crazy, there are people killing themselves over keeping their organisations going, and their organisations actually are meaningless. Their organisations should have died a long, long time ago, but for some reason they’re still feeding them. (Glass 2013: 9)

This diagnosis is echoed by Chris Fremantle: ‘I think, absolutely, organisations have to change; they have to be allowed to die; they are only useful so long as they are actually useful’ (2014: 5). For Fremantle organisations are ‘constructed vehicles’, built in relation to particular purposes but often kept on after the journey is complete. The reasons for this can be both personal and cultural: ‘I think you can get very emotionally attached to organisations, and they get caught within larger political matrixes’ (ibid). Fremantle highlights the often problematic issue of succession, following the tenure of a founder-director, as a case in point. The first instinct of a board is to consider how rather than whether to continue. Roanne Dods (2014: 5) in fact sees the lack of a traditional board structure as one of the reasons why a more loosely governed initiative such as Missions, Models, Money was able to decide when to stop.58 Dods values organisations ‘as a kind of form for making things happen’ but worries that traditional structures are ‘not porous enough’ – too focused on management and not enough on creativity (ibid. 3). She sees alternatives among some of the digital organisations and

58 Described on its web archive as an ‘adhocracy’, MMM (of which Dods was a co-founder) ran from 2004-2014 (www.missionsmodelsmoney.org.uk).

141 smaller arts organisations which ‘allow for that kind of shift and for ideas to flourish from everywhere within the system’ (ibid.). Dods identifies scale as another potential factor in organisational inertia, arguing that small in size does not have to mean small in ambition while the preservation of a large organisation can be a distraction from core purpose (ibid. 5).

4.8.2. Structure and culture

A tension between creating the structure that an organisation requires to function at an appropriate scale with generating the internal culture that is required to energise that function is picked up on by several interviewees. Challenges of talent development and devolved responsibility overlap with demands for clear executive control and accountability. Jane Spiers discusses the importance of ‘growing leadership within your own company’ (2014: 15), emphasising how opportunity and career development potential must be demonstrated if an organisation is to attract, benefit from and keep hold of the most gifted individuals. In this she addresses exactly the problems of recruitment, retention and career paths identified in the cultural leadership crisis of the early 2000s as symptomatic of a ‘desperately fragmented’ sector (Hewison 2004: 159). The issue suggests a particular developmental responsibility held by larger organisations within the wider system, not merely as some sort of contractual return on their public funding, but as a moral recognition of their dependent place within a sectoral community which must collectively nurture the core skills necessary to sustaining their activities. This kind of responsibility is recognised by Spiers, who explicitly locates it in the central philanthropic mission of her company’s charitable aims rather than seeing it as an obligation tied to particular resources (2014: 9).

How to harness leadership potential and organise responsibilities within a company is also a key challenge, however. Sharon Watson articulates a familiar tension between executive (in the sense of business management) and artistic roles. In her company the artistic director and the general manager have been given equal status by the board, something which clearly sits uncomfortably with Watson’s understanding of its artistic mission:

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… that kind of leadership hasn’t been known to work particularly well in other examples that I have been looking at … I think that the organisation is driven artistically. I don’t see how it can not be … But I think I understand business and finance enough to know that I can’t just suddenly run off and have a wonderful experience and spend all the money. (Watson 2014: 8).

For Watson the core of the organisation is its artistic basis so the main responsibility should sit with the artistic role. Different organisations of course approach this in different ways. The relationship between the executive and trustees is a fulcrum of leadership in a voluntary arts organisation. While Andrew Ormston, for example, reports examples of trustee support working very well (2014: 17), elsewhere there can be discomfort not only with individual relationships but with the perceived imposition of this model of governance. Glass, especially, laments the prevalence of advice that ‘every arts organisation should at least consider being a charitable structure’ (2013: 10). For Glass:

… the whole point about the arts and certain ways of working in the arts is that you can lead and be strategic from your heart, with your own thing, and everything about charitable structures undermines that. Everything. So it’s all, you put all the control into your trustees. It’s not - it’s inappropriate. (ibid.)

The writer Christy Adair has identified very much this kind of difficulty in the history of Phoenix Dance, seeing the introduction of a management board in the mid-1980s as taking control away from the passionately driven individual dancers who had founded the company and established its reputation (Adair 2007: 116-121). The change was a consequence of success and a requirement of newly achieved Arts Council funding. Adair is critical of the Arts Council for not supporting the company more effectively at that time to make the transition in governance which its own protocols demanded - although she also acknowledges the necessity and advantages of this broader administrative base for an expanding company (ibid.). It is another common leadership issue encountered by organisations as they attempt to grow beyond the initial template set by their founders. As Chris Fremantle summarises: ‘… a founder director does something very specific, which is invent something and then persuade people that it is

143 not just a project but needs to have a solid entity status’ (2013: 5). Unfortunately, though, ‘nobody talks about how you deal with that’ (ibid.).

4.8.3. Wilful organisations

Of founder directors within the arts and across the voluntary sector, Fremantle observes: ‘it’s wilful individuals who do this, and therefore a lot of the existence of the organisation is bound up with the will of that individual’ (2013: 5). In a sense, then, part of the challenge of leadership in such settings is to translate the wilfulness of these individuals into wilful organisations – structures all parts of which support and progress the central mission. Jane Spiers warns that an organisation developing in this way is never something that can be taken for granted:

… every company has a company culture. Some have several, in different departments. And if you don’t actually take control of it and shape it yourself, it will just emerge, and it may not – in fact it’s very unlikely to be what you want. (Spiers 2014: 4)

This involves processes of development at a different level to the supply of knowledge or technical skills. While ‘you need to do some training to learn how to be a better lighting technician … it’s harder to challenge, you know, a sound technician on a sound desk in the auditorium, in front of 800 customers, chewing gum’ (ibid.).

Sharon Watson also refers to her technical staff when thinking about the ‘mentality’ needed at Phoenix (2014: 6). Aiming to build a mind-set in which ‘there isn’t really anything that’s insurmountable’, Watson wants staff to be able to step ‘outside their comfort zone’ by knowing that support exists within the company to do so (ibid.). She twice refers to the company being ‘small on the inside but big on the outside’ (ibid.) as a summation of this culture and its effect. This is at one level a way of saying that she wants the company to create a great effect with limited resources, but it also describes the high level of personal commitment expected from staff and crew at all levels. Watson takes personal responsibility for generating this, recognising that new members of staff may not immediately understand: ‘but very often, once I’ve had the

144 opportunity to talk to them about why I still believe in Phoenix after 33 years … they also take on board the mantle’ (ibid.). To some extent Watson can be seen here as modelling a transformational style of leadership through devotion to ‘the great cause’ (Alvesson 2011: 64): an appropriate technique for encouraging identification, loyalty and, in some circumstances, compliance (ibid. 67). This is arguably well suited to the needs of resource-strapped cultural and voluntary sector organisations that need their staff to go the extra mile. It clearly needs to be done with integrity if it is to fall on the side of inspiration rather than manipulation, but it is certainly one way in which ‘wilfulness’ can be transmitted within a company.

More than just this stretching of resources, there is also a role for organisational culture to contribute to the creative process itself, supporting the generation but also the realisation of ideas. This is highlighted by Roanne Dods, who reflects on the relationship between producer and artist roles, contending that:

We need organisations that understand what it takes to make artistic work and creative work … Not necessarily as individuals, but certainly as a culture, so you have both the idea generation but then how you hold that idea, make it manifest and reach its audience (Dods 2014: 3)

For Spiers, too, this ability within an organisation to nurture creativity is vital and part of what makes a concept like cultural leadership specifically meaningful. The ideal is:

… to give people the freedom to be creative in their job, to come back with ideas and to tell us how things can be done differently, or better, or more imaginatively. And that’s part of cultural leadership for me, it isn’t just a label about ‘you’re a leader who works in arts and culture’ (Spiers 2014: 17)

These outlooks reiterate the importance of cultural (and particularly arts) organisations as vehicles for facilitating and transmitting creative work. The need to construct and develop appropriate forms and functionality for those vessels - their structures and cultures – is a key preoccupation for many leaders. The organisation remains a primary setting in which artists, managers, cultural entrepreneurs and technical experts

145 interact to realise their work. However, the predominance of traditional large cultural organisations within cultural leadership discourse has begun to shift, particularly as institutional structures have had to be rethought in response to changes in cultural production and the sector’s resource base. Big organisations, like their buildings, can be impressive structures essential to a great range of activities, but they can also be hard to get around and difficult to maintain. A cultural sector seeking to grow its activity in the evolving circumstances of the 21st century must be able to develop appropriate, flexible organisational support tailored to new forms of work rather than preserving old structures simply out of habit. These observations have developed from conversations with leaders still working predominantly in connection with the publicly funded cultural sector. The changes affecting them will affect still more radically the younger generation of cultural producers, referenced by Dods, who are choosing (or impelled) to work outside these structures (Dods 2014: 3). This further suggests that models of leadership for a changing cultural sector will need to be developed from within as drivers for these new vehicles, as opposed to importing templates and techniques designed for other sectors or different circumstances. This is not to propose throwing the baby out with the bathwater: we still need effective leaders for the likes of the Southbank Centre and the Royal Opera House, but there are only so many Southbanks and Opera Houses. We also need many other forms of culture alongside them, and to understand the changing relationship between culture and society which these new configurations produce.

4.9. The public sphere

The work of artists and cultural organisations is essentially a public practice. They engage with issues of public interest and significance; their activities and productions are presented in public settings; in many cases they are supported through public funding and institutions; they frequently take active roles in civic and community life. James Brining describes the work of his organisation in terms of three strands of activity: ‘… one is the theatre we make, one is the environment in which we make it, and one is our pro-activeness about engaging with people who might not otherwise engage with that work’ (2014: 5). These can clearly be mapped onto the Artist as Leader scenarios of art form, organisation and public sphere (Douglas & Fremantle

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2009). Important for Brining is the connection between them: ‘they don’t live in isolation from each other’ (Brining 2014: 5). This kind of connection is crucial to many of the leaders interviewed for this research. As Jane Spiers affirms:

… none of us work in a vacuum. So wherever you’re working you need to be outward looking, engaging, communicating, connecting, understanding the lie of the land, and being aware of the needs of individual artists right through to the needs of a local authority (Spiers 2014: 18)

Engaging with the public sphere appears for these professionals not as an optional extra but as an integral part of how their work is shaped and of the meaning that it takes on in their particular context.

4.9.1. The relational turn

As far as artists themselves are concerned, some interviewees note the ways in which social change is intensifying the relational aspects of their work. Sharon Watson comments on the increasingly ‘disposable’ nature of society: ‘You know, two minutes on the computer and you’ve got what you want’ (Watson 2014: 5). Live art – in this case dance – can offer a response to this, but only if it offers an experience that really connects with people: ‘… the real value of the experience face to face, and engagement – a physical encounter – needs to be special, it needs to be taken to the next level for it to mean anything’ (ibid.). This emphasis on the encounter and the connection suggests a changing dynamic between artists, their work and public audiences. Suzy Glass argues that ‘if the art has a role in society, then it’s not the artist that’s important, it’s their relationship with society and therefore the work that’s important’, reversing a situation she sees as applying in 20th century western culture where the artist was more important than the work (Glass 2013: 14). Roanne Dods, meanwhile, notes ‘the rise of socially engaged art practice across all art forms’, particularly in relation to a more politicised younger generation of artists (in their 20s and early to mid-30s), for whom politics is ‘very much at the human end as opposed to

147 the state end’ of the spectrum (Dods 2014: 1). It is a politics concerned ‘about relationship, as opposed to the economy or anything else’ (ibid.).

Each of these viewpoints identify a trajectory away from the central authority of the artist in the production and reception of their work in the public realm. They can be related to a growing body of critical literature on social, relational and politically engaged art practices (Jackson 2011; Kester 2013; Mesch 2013). Among these authors, Shannon Jackson has demonstrated the ways in which these practices highlight the processes of support that lie behind both the production of art works and all aspects of human interdependence. For Jackson, socially engaged performance appears as ‘a series of supporting relations, relations that sustain entities that are, for all intents and purposes, living’ (Jackson 2011: 42). This recalls Arendt’s theory of action, as these practices reintegrate its elements of beginning and completion, dispensing with the isolation of genius and approaching processes such as the making of meaning through art as collaborative activities which depend as much on reception and interpretation as on transmission and intent.

A parallel with these tendencies can be seen within leadership theory in the rise of post-heroic and participatory styles as counters to the potential narcissism and grandiosity of charismatic transformational leadership in organisational culture (Hewison 2006: 56; Alvesson & Spicer 2011: 16-18). In particular the development of relational styles of arts practice echoes the way in which relational leadership styles may be particularly appropriate to the voluntary and cultural sectors where leaders are expected to embody principles such as care and stability above competitiveness or ‘value for money’ (Hewison 2004: 164; see also 2006: 57). By avoiding the imposition of individual vision and employing more collaborative techniques of direction finding these approaches are especially relevant at times of uncertainty and upheaval, such as have been experienced in the cultural sector since the global financial crisis (Matarasso 2012: 6-7). Changes in social and economic context and changes within cultural practice, individually and in combination, are therefore affecting the ways in which artists and the cultural sector relate to the public realm and negotiate their relevance. Cultural leaders are subject to influence from both directions and must adjust to these scenarios in order to be able to wield influence in turn.

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4.9.2. Community and public benefit

The idea of artists engaging with the public realm can sound very grand, involving senior cultural figures or taking place on the international stage. The Artist as Leader report used the example of Daniel Barenboim, who had featured in a parallel ‘Artist as Leader’ performance programme at the Southbank Centre in 2008, to illustrate the different dimensions of leading through artistic excellence, through co-ordination of other artists and through influence in the political realm as demonstrated by Barenboim’s role in the East-Western Divan (Douglas & Fremantle 2009: 5). However, for other artistic and cultural professionals the public realm starts close to home. As Andrew Ormston confirms: ‘it’s not just about connecting to national or local politics and democratic processes, it’s also about community politics and community engagement and that kind of process’ (2014: 13). He points to examples of ‘really important arts organisations that are actually community organisations at heart’ as well as to lower profile examples of communities themselves campaigning for their local arts centre (ibid.). James Brining, meanwhile, connects his relationship with the public to the nature of his role as a theatre director:

I love story; and I guess that’s primarily driven by people and what happens to people, and that captures my imagination; but that combines with the political act of making theatre, which is about gathering and making something as a community and sharing that with another community and becoming a third community if you like. (Brining 2014: 6)

The challenge for his organisation is to do this in a way which is relevant for a larger public rather than a closed or exclusive theatre audience. All things may be possibly artistically, ‘but it’s about doing that for people who live in a city like Leeds rather than the theatre community … or tourists, which is what a lot of theatre, say in London, focuses on’ (ibid. 4). This demands a process of engagement with the public which involves ‘going into areas of the city or the region to positively affect people’s lives, enabling them to reflect on the world and themselves’ (ibid.).

What Brining describes is admirable in principle but these ambitions also raise certain questions. One of these is about the status given to community involvement and

149 engagement within a cultural system which generally applauds such approaches but does not necessarily match its endorsement with resources. Cluny Macpherson contrasts his experience at Arts Council England with local government, where ‘there are fundamental questions around about why are the cultural expressions at a local community level not afforded the same status, sometimes funding, as what could be caricatured as high art’ (2014: 2). There can also be a distinctly uneven relationship between rhetoric and resources, which is highlighted by Matarasso (2013: 11). Studies into community engagement, participation and co-creative practices have expressed scepticism as to whether any widespread success has been achieved within the cultural sector in in response to those national policies which seek to promote them (Jancovich 2011; 2015; Walmsley 2013). Another question concerns the nature of engagement processes which are promoted and the attitudes or assumptions that lie behind them. Ferdinand Richard is scathing about the approach he sees as prevalent in his country:

French cultural policy considers that we, the sector, the specialist, must bring culture to the people. They are always talking about access to culture, which to me is nonsense. Culture is like health, you have a health. The public responsibility is to help you keep your health good and developing well. (Richard 2014: 3)

Richard calls for a return to ‘the anthropological approach’ to defining culture, which he also sees as key to being able to defend culture on the basis of human rights (ibid. 4). He is effectively arguing for the promotion of cultural democracy, in which culture is defined by the people for and by whom it is made, as opposed to ‘democratisation of culture’, the processes through which official culture is transmitted to the people in well-meaning ways by established institutions (Hope 2011: 176–77; Jancovich 2011: 73).

Various other references are made in the research to the kinds of public benefit culture is expected to produce. These arguments, and the fact that people feel obliged to make them, relate to what Belfiore and Bennett have acknowledged, ‘that public debate about the value of the arts in modern societies was, to a large extent, a consequence of public funding’ (Belfiore & Bennett 2008: 10). Economic arguments are typically mentioned in passing, without being spelled out, on the way to articulating

150 what interviewees see as more important values. Andrew Ormston mentions the ‘obligations’ which come with benefiting from public spending and sees the cultural sector as being ‘a hugely important part of the civil society’ of any city or area (Ormston 2014: 5). He adds, with irony: ‘And probably that role, in my view, is often more important than the economic impact that we’ve so lovingly tended and evaluated for so many years’ (ibid.). Considering which arguments have most traction at a political level in terms of advocating for the arts, Cluny Macpherson acknowledges that there are ‘some around the economic benefit’ but emphasises ‘diversity’ as particularly important within a local authority context while ‘the strongest is around activities for young people, enabling them to thrive and grow and so on’ (2014: 5). He finds that these opportunities are strongly valued amongst adults regardless of their own relationship with culture: ‘And it’s interesting, because it’s not like they want to do it themselves, but they do believe that other people ought to have the opportunity’ (ibid. 6). Richard, from the perspective of Marseille, identifies deeper reasons for prioritising cultural development amongst young people, contrasting this with the superficiality of economically driven cultural programmes which concentrate on business, branding and image:

Communication fades away. And then the real problem is still there, you still have the kids hanging around and, you know, burning cars and going to jihad. And, you know, these kids going to jihad, it’s a cultural problem. Because they are very sensible to sectarisme propaganda because of cultural reasons. If you don’t understand this, you cannot stop it just with police. (Richard 2014: 6)

Richard is critical of the 2013 Marseille Capital of Culture programme for focusing on the look of the place and the development of a creative image rather than highlighting indigenous cultural expression and involving the city’s population in its opportunities (2014: 1-3): ‘Marseille is the biggest hip hop city in France. All the big groups, all the big record sellers, they are coming from Marseille. There was not one single event, hip hop event, during the candidature’ (ibid. 3). He sees ownership of the programme as resting with the local authority and business community rather than driven by the cultural sector, largely as a consequence of how it was financed (ibid. 2). His arguments propose a profound social role for culture in the public realm, but here the responsibility must first be understood and taken on within civil society and cannot be

151 seen as a cultural sector duty in isolation. This inseparability of culture and the political can be seen as a consequence of the anthropological approach that he advocates. Richard flips the usual debate on its head by focusing on civil society’s obligation to cultural life rather than culture’s responsibility to the public. For him, culture cannot fulfil the role allocated to it without this reciprocal commitment. It is an outlook which suggests that public funding should be discussed as a consequence of the public value of culture rather than the other way round.

4.10. Cultural leadership training

The discourse of cultural leadership in the UK is inherently bound up with training and development. Following the foundational use of the term ‘cultural leadership’ in Hewison and Holden’s (2002) Clore Duffield report, the establishment of the Clore Leadership Programme was the immediate and arguably definitive policy action arising from the concept. Cultural leadership was introduced in terms of a lack, beginning a narrative of need and improvement. Even where the meaning of ‘cultural leadership’ is debated, as in Sue Hoyle’s (2014b: 10-11) discussions with Hong Kong University or within the pages of the Cultural Leadership Reader (Kay & Venner 2010), the background object of the discourse is to define a basis for training. The Clore programme itself is almost synonymous with ‘cultural leadership’ in the UK, as evidenced by TBR’s (2013) research for the programme.59 Other development initiatives of the last decade such as the Cultural Leadership Programme and the British Council’s Cultural Leadership International responded to the same agenda, often in similar terms. While these are now defunct, the Clore offer has diversified and numerous courses have developed or are proposed internationally, including a possible ENCATC’s European Cultural Leadership Programme.60

59 This shows 80% of cultural sector respondents with strong awareness of the Clore offer and 25% having taken part in at least one of its activities (TBR 2013: 15, fig.4). This is twice the proportion that have engaged with other cultural sector leadership training providers and more than four times as many as have participated in relevant courses outside the sector (ibid). 60 A survey was circulated by email to ENCATC network members on 21st January 2015 on behalf of a partnership including ENCATC, Nätverkstan, Trans Europe Halles and Olivearte to gather background information towards the development of this initiative.

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4.10.1. Change-making: The Clore Leadership Programme

Perspectives on cultural leadership development among the interviewees range across those who are or have been responsible for major initiatives (Hoyle, Rossello) and those who have mentored trainees or contributed to course activities (Dods, Glass) to those who have experienced programmes as participants (Ward, Watson). Many also have responsibilities for staff development within their organisations. Their experiences illustrate some of the original issues behind cultural leadership development as well as some of the challenges of its delivery. Sharon Watson, for example, returned to Phoenix Dance as Rehearsal Director after her performing career and wanted to learn how to run the company by learning directly from its then artistic director: ‘Because there’s no model for it. But that had a glass ceiling on it, which is why I ended up at the Clore’ (Watson 2014: 10). Within the company, Watson was able to shadow and deputise in terms of artistic processes but found herself unable to learn enough about the finances or management of key relationships. ‘And that’s the learning I needed to have: I needed to understand how to talk to politicians; I needed to understand why we were talking to politicians’ (ibid.). The lack of support she reports encountering for leadership development in her professional role echoes the rationale for the Clore programme’s establishment (Hewison & Holden 2002). Watson wanted to develop the relevant business skills without stepping entirely outside a cultural environment: ‘I figured the Clore would understand it from an artistic perspective … I didn’t feel I could isolate the two completely and just go for a business management course’ (ibid. 18). Even then, as one of ‘a small number of practice based workers that were going for Clore’ – as an artist rather than an administrator - she found herself in a minority:

So I wanted to redress the balance, and I felt that by approaching the Clore, that they would be able to help me with all of those areas, in terms of understanding finance; understanding the PR and publicity engagement; just communications, and … how to manage stakeholders; all the things that I felt that actually are not studio based activity (ibid.)

Watson’s reasons for taking part the programme, informed by a clear ambition and focussed on the skills and knowledge that she wanted to develop, can be compared

153 with Sue Hoyle’s account of what the programme wants from its applicants. Hoyle’s emphasis is on personal qualities and outlook rather than specific abilities. She looks for: ‘people who want to bring about change’; ‘self-knowledge and self-awareness’; people who are ‘curious’ and ‘brave’ who ‘question’ and ‘challenge’ themselves; ‘people who can build relationships with others’ (Hoyle 2014b: 5). The term ‘change- maker’ recurs throughout the interview to indicate what she means by a cultural leader. Hoyle has written in exactly these terms about the values most important to cultural leadership, listing: ‘personal humility, courage, good judgment, certainty of purpose, authenticity and generosity in delivery’ (Hoyle 2014a). Her approach is consistent with Robert Hewison’s advocacy of leadership training which emphasises ‘behaviours, not skills’ as appropriate for developing individuals who can challenge and change organisational culture, rather than just operating comfortably within it (Hewison 2006: 55). It contrasts with the style Pablo Rossello reports encountering at Cultural Leadership International in its first year: ‘It was what I would call a high level management crash course … it was very CBT meets human resources. There was nothing culturally specific, it was pretty sickly, addressing these needs’ (Rossello 2014: 3).

Hoyle also reflects on the place of practising artists in the Clore programme and shows this to be a longstanding concern. She acknowledges the influence of the Artist as Leader thinking and how dedicated artist fellowships were developed in response: ‘So it was really to signal more broadly that, although we’d always had a dancer fellowship and so on, that actually we wanted to think more broadly’ (Hoyle 2014b: 13). Hoyle denies that the programme was ever ‘all about suits’, as a journalist suggested to her in the early days that it would be (ibid. 5), and also points out that artists have always been involved in contributing course content regardless of the extent to which they have attended as participants (ibid. 14). Whether this is sufficient, and how far the creative elements of the programme can be pushed, remain for Hoyle open questions:

Could we be doing more, across the group as well as supporting them individually to think about aesthetic developments, artistic judgements, forms of collaboration; do we consciously need to build that more into the programme or should we allow it to evolve just from the nature of the people that we choose or the way in which they interact? (Hoyle 2014b: 14)

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It is one of a couple of moments in the interview where Hoyle says: ‘I’m thinking a bit about that at the moment’ (ibid). One thing she is very clear on is that the programme is not fixed, and indeed she asserts that: ‘We’ve never replicated any course … even though we’ve run four short courses a year, the content of those four short courses would be very different’ (ibid. 9). The flexibility and evolution of the programme is described at length, including references to technological change, international diversification, changes in course duration, new forms of engagement with employers and an increase in self-directed learning (ibid. 6-8). Overall there is a balance to be struck between providing business leadership to cultural specialists (as demanded by the likes of Watson) and ensuring that the training somehow incorporates the sector’s cultural and creative character as well as its breadth. Generating encounters across different parts of the sector within the programme is one way in which ‘cultural’ leadership starts to become more specifically meaningful as a concept: ‘I have to remind myself sometimes of the vital importance of having artists embedded in the programme in all sorts of different ways, for people who work in the cultural sector but actually have very little engagement with artists’ (ibid. 13-14).

This also provides a response to one of the criticisms previously levelled at cultural sector leadership, that a ‘culture of professionalism’ kept different parts of the sector separate, valuing only their own specialist knowledge (Hewison 2004: 164). The potential for cross-fertilisation was significant but would require people to look beyond their own silos: ‘Museum people could learn more about issues of education, access and entrepreneurship from the performing arts, and the performing arts could learn much from museums about the management of their buildings and the effective use of volunteers’ (ibid.). This is substantially a matter of attitude, as Hoyle has observed: ‘Leadership development is about learning, not being taught’ (Hoyle 2014c). Her identification of humility and self-awareness as among the main prerequisites for individuals looking to develop leadership capacity could equally be applied at a sectoral level.

One caveat should be attached to the emphasis on change expressed by Hoyle, which can also be related to the ‘resilience’ imperative outlined above (4.3.3). There is no doubt great practical value in equipping cultural leaders to deal effectively with change in their practices and institutions. However, the normalisation of continual change in work environments can also be seen as serving an underlying political and economic

155 purpose less consistent with the interests and (perhaps) ethics of cultural practitioners. A common feature of contemporary management theory (see, for example, Al-Haddad & Kotnour 2015 for a summary of this literature), the emphasis on change also reflects a ‘discourse of flexibility’ (Jackson 2011: 23) through which collective structures such as unions and state welfare are opposed to creative spontaneity and rebellious individualism.61 This idealisation of flexibility reinforces neo-capitalist economics by destabilizing employment and atomising the workforce. The art world can be seen as not only complicit but even at the vanguard of this tendency, as Pascal Gielen has argued (Gielen 2015b: 95-100). By promoting high levels of mobility and flexible working it creates the conditions for its own exploitation.62 These considerations suggest that some wariness is therefore needed when encountering an apparent orthodoxy of change within any kind of management or leadership discourse, particularly in the cultural sector.

4.10.2. Other voices

One possible effect of the central place of training and development in the discourse on cultural leadership may have been to locate potential for change primarily at the level of the individual, rather than questioning the function and behaviour of institutions or the sector and its processes more generally. Concentration on leadership is itself associated with a tendency to over-identify both problems and solutions with leaders themselves while systemic effects are ‘downplayed’ (Alvesson 2011: 68). However, interviewees in this research repeatedly stress the importance of cultural issues within their organisations and the sector as well as reflecting on influences from outside the sector which shape the forms of action possible within it. These too can be considered as aspects of ‘cultural leadership’ in a systemic sense. The relationship of individuals to such issues appears pivotal in finding appropriate approaches to cultural leadership development. As Hewison warned in 2004:

61 For Jackson, this is the answer to ‘what happened’ to the anti-authoritarian spirit of the sixties: it was co-opted to support a neo-liberal dismantling of state institutions and collective structures (Jackson 2011: 22-4). 62 Gielen’s essay is titled The Art Scene: A Production Unit for Economic Exploitation? He also questions the art world’s romanticisation of nomadism and outsider status from the same perspective in Nomadeology: The Aestheticization of Nomadic Existence (Gielen 2015b: 103-114).

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… in a system where only heroic leadership appears capable of overcoming all the obstacles and difficulties that are inherent in the system – the issues of funding and morale mentioned earlier – then the failure to overcome them is seen as a personal failure, and not the fault of the system that created the obstacles and difficulties in the first place. (Hewison 2004: 163)

If training can only equip individuals to cope better with the symptoms of such issues then the causes would need to be addressed at a different level. An emphasis on personal leadership could even be a diversion from challenging the status quo and, potentially, those established interests that benefit from keeping things as they are. Hewison counters this by pointing out that in the end ‘it is not “institutions” that change things, it is the people within them’ (Hewison 2006: 55). Quoting Mark Moore’s arguments concerning the principles of ‘Public Value’, Hewison holds that the purpose of leadership training should be to achieve cultural change by shifting the foundations of individual thinking rather than simply equipping people with skills. This provides a theoretical justification for Hoyle’s emphasis on behaviours. It also suggests that the role of development programmes should be to promote and embed those more relational forms of leadership which are ultimately better capable of addressing the sector’s most fundamental structural and cultural challenges.

The basic need for cultural leadership training may be well established, but if some training is good it does not necessarily follow that more is better. Suzy Glass, in particular, is sceptical as to whether the sector needs the extent of leadership development which has been directed at it:

‘I’m not anti-leadership training – but … we keep trying to train everyone in leadership, and actually not everyone’s a leader, and nor should they be. Because if everyone were a leader then there’d be no-one doing anything, they’d all be walking around leading!’ (Glass 2013: 13)

Glass is half-joking, but she goes on to describe the experience of an unnamed cultural professional that she sees as having been effectively damaged by a course of leadership training for which this individual was not personally suited (ibid.). Her

157 sentiments also recall Gordon and Stark’s (2010) criticism of the ‘hubris’ of cultural leadership training at a time of scarce resources.63 The comment is also interesting in the way it splits the world between those who ‘lead’ and those who ‘do’, very much following the classical division of action critiqued by Arendt (1998). Glass elsewhere argues strongly for ‘distributive leadership’ and the importance of people developing ideas together (ibid. 4), a concept which implies that almost everyone can, indeed, be a leader (or, at least, that everyone can contribute to leadership – which is not quite the same thing).64 This is not necessarily a contradiction: it may be that Glass is personally committed to more fluid, relational approaches but suspects formal courses of fitting people to hierarchical templates relevant to only a minority of professional positions. However this might be resolved, the example illustrates the persistence of traditional concepts of leadership within habits of speech. Meanwhile, in Glass’s argument for training to be delivered with regard for individual style and suitability, a clear echo can be heard of Hoyle’s prioritisation of behavioural qualities as selection criteria for Clore Fellows. What is interesting about both positions is that, while they do assume that leadership can be developed, they simultaneously suggest that a leader’s most important qualities are innate. Leaders, it is implied, are both born and made. Their skills can be developed, but only certain individuals will be predisposed to benefit fully from the attempt. The ghost of the heroic leader seems to lurk within this slightly strained formulation, but perhaps it is just the shadow cast by leadership’s awkwardly ambiguous shape. Cultural leadership in particular seems to alternately resemble a person, a toolbox and a collaborative process. Those required to work pragmatically with the concept on a daily basis must learn to coexist with its contradictions.

4.10.3. Further directions

Whether or not the right amount of cultural leadership training is made available, there remain challenges for providers in developing appropriate access to what there is. Sue Hoyle reports working with over 80 separate funding partners during the lifetime of the Clore programme, developing relationships with individual cultural institutions to

63 See 3.7 above. 64 Hewison invokes an argument made by Keith Grint, Professor of Leadership Studies at Lancaster University, that ‘leadership is the property and consequence of a community rather than the property and consequence of an individual leader’ (Grint 2005: 38; quoted in Hewison 2006: 55)

158 support course places for their employees and finding resources from major public sources to fulfil strategic aims such as the creation of the Artist Fellowships (Hoyle 2014b: 15). Gaps necessarily remain. Hoyle is aware, for example, that ‘because of that funding model, not every Fellowship we offer, not every course we offer, is as accessible for people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as it is for people from England’ (ibid. ). Clore and every other programme can always be critiqued and re- examined from perspectives of geographical spread, representation of cultural form, balance of gender and ethnicity, or type of job roles represented. These questions were not directly addressed in the present research.

If training and development agendas have defined the main pathways for cultural leadership discourse and activities, it is worth pointing out that the handful of initiatives taking place under the Artist as Leader banner have progressed along a slightly different trajectory. The research programme which led to Douglas and Fremantle’s (2009) report included various peer to peer exchanges between professionals, including a week-long residential event, which aimed at opening up the meanings of leadership and challenging the place of the artist within policy discourse. The Southbank Centre’s 2008 Artist as Leader programme explored similar concepts through live performance and public debate.65 More recently, Clore Fellow Joshua Sofaer’s interviews and reflections on the Artist as Leader concept, published on the a- n website during 2012-13, have questioned the experience and perception of leadership within artistic practice.66 While closely related to the concept of cultural leadership, with which this research itself forms part of a dialogue, the Artist as Leader work opens up issues around the social and aesthetic roles of creative practitioners. These areas could be opened up in two ways: firstly by thinking about the wider social roles of a broader cross section of cultural sector leaders, and secondly by trying to understand how cultural leadership as a process works more generally, in terms of the influence brought to bear upon cultural and aesthetic development from forces outside the sector. The following chapters will begin to consider how such enquiries could take shape.

65 http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/sites/default/files/press_releases/Barenboim_Artist_As_Leader_PR .pdf 66 http://www.a-n.co.uk/tag/artist-as-leader. Sofaer was the Clore Leadership Programme’s first Artist Fellow and explored the Artist as Leader concept independently following the Fellowship.

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Chapter 5: Spheres of cultural leadership

5.1. The critical practice of cultural leadership

This chapter takes a step back from the close empirical engagement with interview texts of chapter 4 to develop several larger themes arising from the analysis which resonate with areas of literature considered in chapter 3. It considers the relationship of cultural leadership to policy, the cultural sector and the public more broadly, reflecting particularly on the three spheres of action occupied by the Artist as Leader and how this model might be extended to accommodate cultural leadership as both process and practice.

The chapter begins in theoretical terms, considering on the one hand the relationship of leadership to authority and on the other the essentially political nature of modern art (5.1.1). Pascal Gielen’s (2015b) account of art’s underlying ‘contingency’ is connected to Hannah Arendt’s (1998) theory of action, highlighting the critical role of art in society. From this an alternative view of the value and purpose of cultural leadership is extrapolated, suggested implications for the place of the artist within it (5.1.2). Issues of trust are also further explored with concern for their practical implications around relationships and processes, including those of public sector cultural funding (5.2.1). This leads to a discussion of the three-way relationship between the public, government and the cultural sector as sites of action in the publicly funded cultural system (5.2.2). An analytical framework for cultural leadership is then introduced, outlining the interplay between individual action and external influence as dynamic forces in cultural development across artistic, organisational and public spheres (5.3.1; 5.3.2). This visualises the understanding of cultural leadership developed through the research and offers a basis for further debate and exploration. The relationship between these issues is then summarised (5.4).

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5.1.1. Leadership and authority

Human society has always had its leaders and has never been short of speculation into the necessary qualities of kings, queens, generals, popes, aristocrats and archbishops. As already noted (3.6 above), enquiry into the attributes of those who rule has occupied thinkers in every era from Plato to Carlyle (Grint 2005: 6). Surprisingly, however, the English language lacked the unifying concept of ‘leadership’ until relatively recently. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citation of the term dates from 1821.67 It is first applied to organised political contexts (leadership of the house, leadership of the opposition), subsequently to military and industrial settings, and eventually becomes a quality applicable in all walks of life. Leadership, as a distinct concept, thus appears to be born with the modern era, alongside industrialisation and subsequent to the Enlightenment. It may be no coincidence that its first applications are within the structures of democracy. Whereas, previously, we had been ruled by concepts of ‘kingship’ or ‘lordship’ (both 14th century or earlier), or through the qualities of being ‘princely’ or ‘priestly’ (both 15th century), the parliamentary system was by the early 19th century – at least in theory – opening the way for power to be assigned for reasons other than birth and title. Carlyle himself, though no friend of democracy, scorned the idea that the heroic leaders he sought must ‘be always the eldest-born of a certain genealogy’ (1892: 5). If the low-born are to be permitted to wield influence and take executive responsibility, then perhaps this is when it becomes necessary to have ways of describing the essential virtues of leaders independent of the terms derived from rank.

This much is also speculation, but it is consistent at least with the intellectual currents flowing into social and political life from the Enlightenment onwards. Michel Foucault, for example, in analysing Kant’s characterisation of Enlightenment, describes it as the process that allows humankind to ‘escape from its immaturity’ (Foucault 1984: 35). This immaturity is a ‘state of our will that makes us accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called for’ (ibid. 34). Under the conditions of Enlightenment, therefore, there is no given authority to lead which cannot be challenged by reason. Authority instead becomes ‘given’ by reason; it is no longer the gift of God.

67 http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/106604?redirectedFrom=leadership#eid

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One possible understanding of leadership, then, is as a form of authority acquired through the exercise of reason. As it is in the nature of reason to question authority, leadership’s justification is also its challenge. It must question itself and renew its reasonable basis, or it becomes legitimately ripe for replacement. Leadership must be guarded by reason against reversion to Lordship. For many artists, part of the role of cultural expression itself is to expose or critique the operation of power, making their relationship to it uncomfortable and problematic. It is notable that the frequent unwillingness of artists to identify with the idea of leadership is rooted in an almost instinctive suspicion of authority, or at least of those who would assume it – to the extent that the notion of cultural or artistic leadership becomes almost an oxymoron (Sofaer 2012; Glass 2013: 12). Unsurprisingly, these forms of discomfort can become apparent in the cultural sector’s relationship with the state, and differences in value system and motivation may even render it ‘dysfunctional’, with cultural policy becoming a closed conversation between experts amidst a hostile media discourse (Holden 2006: 10).

The project of state-sponsored cultural philanthropy – together with many private forms of arts funding – still bears many hallmarks of Enlightenment thinking, certainly in the UK. It is based on the fundamental assumption that culture is a moral force for good and that a healthy artistic life is a civilising and improving influence on a nation, very much in the Arnoldian tradition (Belfiore & Bennett 2007: 143-5; 2008: 27). If governments have a responsibility to do good and to improve their nation, then they should encourage the arts and support cultural development and education. For this reason we have state patronage. Where this system supports artists, it therefore ascribes to them the power of good: their practice and productions are invested with a positive moral status. It grants them not just resources but a social role, particularly where the state’s interests in instrumental rather than intrinsic outcomes are explicit (Holden 2006). The subsidised artist accepts the attribution of moral authority from the reasonable state, but by the same principle of reason must question the basis of that authority. According to this ethic, the civilising role of the artist includes the duty to challenge the structure that supports them. The critical function of reason is obliged to disrupt the linear moral narrative of Enlightenment progress. The artist that ceases to question authority is, in a sense, no longer worthy of its support; the artist wholly identified with power has, in moral terms at least, become ripe for replacement. It

163 therefore requires conscious critical engagement with the structures on which their practice depends for artists to maintain individual agency and relevance.

This does not mean that the system itself will punish artists for complicity with power. At various times and places throughout history, of course, art has served the interests of the powerful very effectively, whether as a communicating vessel for the church, in displaying the status of princes or promoting the ideology of the state. The critical function of culture is by no means unique to the modern era but becomes far more central to its significance and depends on particular forms of cultural development. This is important in relation to a discourse of cultural leadership which is developing globally and encountering some very different assumptions about culture, leadership and authority. It is a point which goes to the heart of the social role of leadership within modern art and culture and its philosophical basis is worth exploring further.

5.1.2. Art and contingency

In his essay The art of democracy, Pascal Gielen argues that modern art should be seen as ‘contingent’ in two important ways: through its ‘post-auratic’ and ‘post- academic’ characteristics (Gielen 2015b: 153-167). The notion of post-auratic art arises as a consequence of Walter Benjamin’s thesis, articulated in The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, that art in the modern age has lost its aura, its ‘criterion of authenticity’, as a cultural consequence of mass production (Benjamin 1999: 218).68 Gielen picks up on a comment of Benjamin’s that this changes art’s social function, moving it from a basis in ritual to being ‘founded in politics’ (Gielen 2015b: 154). Whereas the auratic work of art ‘pretends to exist outside of history’, denying its ‘transitoriness’ and asserting itself as ‘monumental’, post-auratic art, originating in modernity or the avant-garde, ‘is open to the future and to the transformations that may befall it there’ (ibid: 160). Post-auratic art is conscious of its own reproducibility, the possibility of change, its dependence on context and existence in relation to others. In this sense it is ‘contingent’. Post-academic art, meanwhile, is that which, following the decline of the rule-bound Académie française and similar

68 Benjamin’s essay was first published in 1936.

164 systems, denies the authority of any fundamental standard-setting (and therefore art- defining) entity.

Gielen draws on the ideas of Nathalie Heinich, Paolo Virno and Niklas Luhmann to show that art in this tradition is essentially transgressive, introducing a ‘dismeasure’ (Virno’s term) into the ‘measure’ of the dominant culture - one which can be aesthetic, political or cognitive in nature (ibid: 160-1). This dismeasure creates alternative possibilities, challenging the way things are by asserting that they could always be otherwise. Quoting Luhmann, Gielen suggests that this is a major part of its function in society, to dispute the ‘culturally obvious’, to deviate from the standard (ibid: 161). Its identification as art, in fact, depends on this deviation. It is defined in relation to society’s ‘measure’ and is in this sense ‘contingent’. Dismeasure is therefore necessary for something to be considered art in the post-academic era, but it is not sufficient - it depends also on context and response. It is not a case of ‘anything goes’: to survive in the professional art world each artist must propose and argue for a new grounding for their work and to ‘make their own position as artists the subject of debate’ (ibid.).

Post-auratic and post-academic art is therefore neither ‘fundamental’ (based on universal rules such as those of the academy) nor ‘anti-fundamental’ (denying the need for justification) but ‘post-fundamental’, constantly re-making its foundations and renegotiating its contingent relationship with the wider culture. Its gestures are ‘singular’ as differentiated from ‘individual’: uniquely formulated, carving out a place between existing positions, but not ‘isolated’ or ‘self-sufficient’ (ibid 161-2). Gielen further argues that modern art so defined can only exist in democratic conditions which allow the emergence of minority positions from within: ‘the post-auratic and post- academic art of dismeasure can only survive by the grace of democracy’ (ibid: 166). There is a tension between the function of art and the rise of political agendas such as neo-nationalism and neo-liberalism, which resist challenges to their respective ‘fundamental’ values of stable national identity and the absolute authority of the market. This implies that modern art is in turn a supporter of democracy (understood as an ideal rather than in any particular incarnation) through its impulse to continually challenge and invigorate dominant forms, voicing minority positions. The production of art, then, is unavoidably and dynamically related to political conditions.

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Gielen’s arguments resonate more convincingly with some areas of the arts than others. The need to argue for the legitimacy of a position is acknowledged within the essay to be ‘most evident in the visual arts’ (ibid: 162), while the function of art as social critique is arguably not so new or modern, as traditions of satiric poetry from Juvenal to the English Augustans readily attest. Moreover, the extent to which the arts are entertainment, pastime or a source of income can dilute or conceal any political function, and the art world preserves plenty of pre-modern forms and classical values in its structures and institutions, many of which are very much part of the ‘measure’ of mainstream culture. However, the decline in absolute aesthetic authority or fixed rules is recognisable across art forms; the productive ‘dismeasure’, the disruption of classical form and conventional harmony, the impulse to transgress, is similarly familiar. The constant reinvention of contemporary art forms, the decline in relevance of yesterday’s revolutionary ‘dismeasure’ which has become today’s expected cliché, is one of the regular challenges to policy, especially as it struggles with historic patterns of support and tries to balance the heritage aspects of arts funding with the developmental. Standard policy and funding criteria such as ‘excellence’ start to look anachronistically ‘fundamental’ if viewed through a post-academic lens. Decisions cannot be produced by simple measurements of technical competence, but depend on arguments about relevance, style, concept and purpose. Artistic success cannot be read off the scale of a single value system, but involves arguments for and between different value systems.

These concepts of singularity, dismeasure, the post-fundamental and the contingent each have implications for the position of the artist in relation to cultural leadership. They reinforce the idea that art and artists cannot be separated off from political culture in some kind of aesthetic bubble or arts-world ivory tower. To do so is to separate them from a primary function of art, and therefore from the possibility of creating successful modern works. Art is politically and socially relevant not merely when it is serving some kind of instrumental purpose, but in and of itself, as part of the condition of its existence. The principle of singularity demonstrates how art, even when at its most original and unique, cannot be isolated. The position of the individual artist must be defined in relation to the collective. The production of ‘dismeasure’ through the work of art is itself an act of leadership in the Arendtian sense of ‘beginning’ (archein); it is the imagination of how things can be otherwise and as such contains the possibility of change (Arendt 1998: 223-3). The realisation of this potential naturally depends on

166 others for its execution and completion (prattein); this response may take place at aesthetic or cognitive levels, but it is unavoidably part of what Arendt defines as ‘the political realm’ in that it ‘rises directly out of acting together’ (ibid: 198). It is the contingency of art - its essential incompleteness as an act and dependence on others for the completion of its meaning - which makes possible the role of an artist as leader in the post-fundamental public sphere.

5.2. Culture, policy and the public sphere

Some years ago Australian researcher Jo Caust, looking back on 1960s assertions by the Australia Council that its role was ‘enabling’ rather than about the creation of arts policy, reflected that ‘the idea that government arts funding bodies should just stand back and “allow” seems now rather quaint when governments expect “outcomes for their investments”’ (Caust 2003: 52). Caust goes on to challenge policy discourse through which the arts are asked to demonstrate their economic value and to bow to market forces, lamenting that their role ‘as a tool for interpreting the world in which we live and as a means for providing transformational experiences’ should not be ‘reduced to a set of figures’ (ibid: 61). It is by now a familiar argument against the processes of instrumentalism, but it is interesting to revisit this and consider what else may be lost when funding bodies change stance and close their distance. A key issue here, which seems rarely to be discussed in cultural policy discourse, is that of trust.

5.2.1 The foundation of trust

The importance of trust is pinpointed in Hewison’s 2006 essay for Demos on leadership and cultural value, which connects the issues of institutional trust then affecting Arts Council England and its stakeholders with ‘the heart of the problem facing the cultural sector: the crisis of legitimacy’ (Hewison 2006: 35). Without trust, the arm’s length principle governing the relationship between politicians and the arts sector breaks down, and the relationship between the funding body and its constituency similarly suffers. Hewison goes on to describe the way in which

167 managerialist processes being imposed on the public sector, while aiming at producing more effective and accountable models of work, undermined the relationships on which the system as a whole depends. He comments that ‘although this is the hardest relationship to quantify, it is the most important of all. Trust is a form of social capital, it creates a sense of identification between the organisation and those to whom it relates’ (Hewison 2006: 32). It is not merely the fact of instrumentalisation that is corrosive – the imposition of government agendas on the cultural sector – but the way that this pressure is applied, through the ‘audit culture’ mechanisms of what has been termed New Public Management (Belfiore 2004; Bell & Oakley 2015).

An experience from my own work history serves to illustrate this further. It relates to a meeting sometime in the early 2000s when I was responsible for Leeds City Council’s Arts & Regeneration Unit, which included operation of the city’s arts grants. It was the era of ‘Best Value’, a well-intentioned national initiative which, as far as I could tell, was supposed to move local government procurement beyond the false economies of always having to choose the cheapest quote and onto more rounded appraisal of the quality and long term effectiveness of tenders.69 However, two things were noticeable about the implementation of Best Value: one, that even where it was properly understood, bureaucratic assessments became focused on what was absolutely predictable about proposed work and officers struggled to compare the qualitative elements, or to demonstrate the transparency and fairness of decisions based on quality. For larger contracts, complex formulas were devised to translate these considerations into quantitative values, and processes became highly outcome- oriented with little tolerance for variables. Secondly, it was apparent that for many managers, the words ‘best value’ simply connoted ‘cheap’, and so the object of the exercise was often lost. The one principle that seemed to stick was that we should get three quotes for everything, and had to prove to our finance departments that we had done so before payments would be authorised. The decision was then generally made on the basis of the cheapest quote – or else would have to be justified via an additional form-filling process. At the same time, there was pressure within the authority to tie all projects and expenditure to the overall corporate plan with reference to the ‘Vision for Leeds’, which was a strategy document drawn up in consultation with the voluntary and

69 Best Value was New Labour’s replacement for Compulsory Competitive Tendering in UK public services, first appearing as an election manifesto pledge in 1997 and subsequently implemented via the Local Government Act of 1999. It is associated with importing a new performance-focused audit culture into the sector (Arnaboldi & Lapsley 2008).

168 private sectors in the city. This was intended to make decision making more coherent and democratically relevant.

Within this system, the process of grant-giving sat uncomfortably. As applicants well know, grant processes can be intensely competitive – even though this impression can be deceptive where awards follow history, habit or political pressure. However, they differ from tenders and procured work in the important respect that aims and objectives are determined by the applicant, and within social programmes in general and arts work in particular, the variables that remain in relation to process and outcome can be considerable. The desire for control that managerial processes like Best Value import into the culture is frustrated. The fact of having a grant process rather than any more direct form of procurement is a recognition that the key expertise in terms of deciding what should be done, with whom, and how, rests with the applicant. It is essentially a deferral to the local knowledge of the (often voluntary sector) applicant on the part of the (often public sector) funder. Whatever processes are in place to check applicant credential and monitor their work, it is a system fundamentally based on trust.

At the meeting in question, it was suggested to me by a senior manager that we should be moving away from grants towards a system of voluntary sector arts commissions. The advantage of commissioning would be that the authority could set parameters in terms of which social groups or localities would be targeted, how the work would relate to ‘Vision’ themes and when it would take place across the year. The whole process could then conform to Best Value principles, and would give the department increased autonomy and agenda setting potential at a time when flexible project budgets were being squeezed. What did I think?

At the time, I was working alongside a number of the grant-funded organisations to develop new arts work in targeted communities defined by non-culturally specific regeneration funding from national government (Single Regeneration Budget) and European (European Regional Development Fund and European Social Fund) sources. I was in the process of learning some acute practical lessons about the difficulties of both predicting and proving the social and economic outcomes of creative projects to the satisfaction of these funders and their auditors, and about the restrictions on small and medium scale local arts organisations in responding to objectives outside their core mission. I explained to the senior manager my concern

169 that local authority revenue grants were one of only two sources of funding (alongside the Arts Council) that these organisations could use for meeting their core staffing costs and overheads. For the smaller organisations that were not regularly funded by the Arts Council we were the only such resource. Without any contribution to these costs, the sector would not have capacity for any of the preparation or development work that allowed us to attract external funding for collaborative work, nor to engage in meetings or consultations about city strategy, or to developing the relationships and intelligence at neighbourhood level that enabled their own regular project work. If we funded only through outcome-driven commissions, arts organisations would have to be much stricter about securing full cost recovery, meaning that project costs would go up, and we would only be able to consult and draw information from the sector to the extent that we paid for the privilege. We would also be forcing them into competition for contracts, reducing the extent to which they may be willing to share knowledge or support each other’s work, which also seemed to be against the ethos of the sector. Additionally, the authority would have to take additional responsibility for knowing what forms of work were needed at community level, as it would be in the position of calling all the shots. We would be taking on this responsibility at the same time as shrinking our connection with local intelligence. In short, the proposed change threatened to take the trust out of the system, and therefore out of the relationships. It wasn’t enacted, at least not in Leeds at that time - I was fortunate to have a manager who would listen to my arguments against it - but it was clear how the tide of local authority budgetary culture was moving inexorably in this direction. The issue has come up again in a recent research interview, again in the context of Leeds, where the current Chief Officer for Culture and Sport, Cluny Macpherson, observes:

… there’s elements of local government which really struggle with the idea that you give a grant to somebody. They couldn’t propose that you give them a grant rather than you procure the outcome… there’s a sort of confusion about how ideas and creativity [are] at the basis of it, rather than outcomes. (Macpherson 2014: 6)

The pressure for public sector managers to ensure efficiency and to control results comes at the expense of trust and what it can produce: generosity, flexibility, discovery, creativity. The result, in the language of policy criticism, is ‘functional disruption’, with the existing system undermined by an overemphasis on the needs of

170 one stakeholder (Sieber 1981: 188-9). In leadership terms, this tendency marks a regression from a relational to a transactional model. It also fails to learn the lesson of Arendt’s theory of action: the impossibility of controlling outcomes from processes that, once set in motion, depend on others for their completion. Instead it vainly seeks predictable conclusions for the stories it begins, and setting up ever more rigid command and control structures whenever other events or actors change the narrative.

Caust’s concern is for artistic rather than economic criteria to be re-prioritised within the decision making and evaluation of public arts agencies. The example I have described here is not of a situation where economic objectives were being substituted for artistic ones; it was produced by managerial thinking rather than a neo-liberal value system – which, I would argue, remain distinguishable in public service despite a strong relationship between them.70 What it does indicate is a shift in the power relationship between the arts and authority. It represents at a local level an attitude that can be described in exactly the terms Caust uses to summarise that of New Labour’s QUEST committee, set up as a watchdog for national arts sector performance: ‘The government is clear that the transaction between the government and the arts sector is about the artists pursuing the government’s objectives, in return for the arts organisations receiving the money they want’ (Caust 2003: 58). Such a relationship erodes the critical role of the artist in society and the space available for independent or dissenting perspectives to find a voice through their work. Not only does this downgrade the artist’s role in relation to the state and, ultimately, the public, but it undermines the legitimacy of the very system that was set up to serve them. As Hewison puts it in relation to Arts Council England: ‘the practices of the New Public Management… have, in the interests of greater accountability and government control, destroyed trust. Overregulated by the imposition of targets through its Funding Agreement…it is no wonder that there has been a crisis of confidence’ (Hewison 2006: 36).

70 Although there is clearly a hefty overlap between managerial and neo-liberal discourse as both frames of reference assume that anything of value can be directly measured. Managerialism can even be seen as a by-product of neoliberalism in that its processes of control substitute for the forms of trust that neo-liberal economics drive out of professional relationships (leading, for example, to the need for public regulatory bodies to be set up as overseers of newly privatised systems). However, it is possible to apply managerial methods to social concerns which have little to do with neo-liberal values. It is this which appears to be common in contemporary public services.

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This loss of trust and confidence is accelerated by processes which dismantle the relationships through which mutual understanding could be maintained. Hewison laments ‘the dissolution, in the interests of “efficiency”, of the former unpaid advisory art form panels, which created a form of permanent peer review at a lower level’ which he sees as leading to ‘a disconnection between ACE’s national office and the arts constituency’ (ibid: 35).

A closely related concern is expressed by Andrew Ormston, who has worked closely with arts boards in a number of senior local authority roles. In his judgement, the distancing from the sector of ACE within this new culture meant that it ‘rather lost touch with its biggest asset around influence, which was the boards of all of its client base’, thereby draining the strength of its advocacy network:

… the boards of the client base had some of the most influential people from around the UK on them… But I got a sense through the managerialist agenda that somehow that got lost, and that all of a sudden board members didn’t necessarily think they were in the same boat as the Arts Council. (Ormston 2014: 16)

Across the world in Australia a close parallel can be found. Caust observes that:

… the disappearance of specialist art form committees and staff and the introduction of generic committees and categories have left many practitioners disenfranchised. Unless they learn the new language and conform to the dominant culture, they are totally isolated from the power base and deprived of any financial support. (Caust 2003: 57)

Caust, Hewison and Ormston emphasise different implications of the relational gap emerging between the funders and the funded, ironically driven by the shortening of the original arm’s length. On the one hand the funder, in this case Arts Council England, faces the loss of allies, influence and legitimacy. On the other, the sector becomes disempowered, unable to advocate effectively and subordinated to inimical values. The issue is by no means limited to the places and times described by Caust and Hewison, as the 2012 meltdown of Creative Scotland has subsequently

172 demonstrated. This ‘stooshie’ followed a clumsy attempt by the organisation’s leadership to reform its funding aims and processes which left a self-styled ‘cultural community’ of Scottish artists and organisations feeling threatened and excluded (Stevenson 2014: 180). The row boiled over into an effective declaration of no confidence by the sector via an open letter to the press and resulted in the resignation of Creative Scotland’s Chief Executive and his deputy – bearing out Philip Schlesinger’s (2009) earlier concerns about the organisation’s evolution (see 4.3.1 above, note 5). David Stevenson identifies a conflict of discourse at the centre of these events, with the cultural community’s polarised version being that:

… a distinguishable body of “artists” and their supporters, transparent in their decision-making and united in their dissatisfaction and common language, are resisting a dangerous ideological power-grab by “nonartist” bureaucrats who are the source of an unfair and opaque system rife with obfuscating language (ibid: 181)

The blue touch-paper of that language was the term ‘cultural commissioning’, which was intended to describe a more strategic approach to funding, but suggested (perhaps inadvertently) that the funder wanted an inappropriate level of curatorial control over the work of the sector. It became a signifier for the ideological danger of business-oriented, non-aesthetic criteria becoming imposed on the funding system (ibid.); exactly the sort of problem with this language, particularly in the context of grant funding, that had alarmed me a decade earlier in Leeds.71 It is natural for funders to want to take a strategic overview of how their resources are used, and it should be part of their job to evaluate and review this. However, processes of control drive out trust and, as the Creative Scotland example demonstrates, goodwill quickly follows it out the door.

It needs an awful lot of process to fill the gap left by trust, which is perhaps another way of saying that it needs an awful lot of management to substitute for leadership. Good management and efficient processes are as desirable in arts and cultural

71 Philip Schlesinger raised warning flags about Creative Scotland even before it was fully established in law, arguing that, in approving the very name of the new organisation, the Scottish Executive was uncritically adopting New Labour’s ‘creative industries’ discourse and setting the body up on neo-liberal principles. He questioned whether a workable structure could emerge capable of serving simultaneous arts and creative industries priorities (Schlesinger 2009).

173 institutions as they are anywhere, but unless they are complemented by strong relationships and an environment of trust, many of their practices may be counter- productive. Trust must therefore be understood as an indispensable component of leadership at both personal and institutional levels in the cultural sector. The structures through which the professional and political elements of the sector relate have a major influence on how trust may be nurtured or lost and their evolution remains a major area of challenge for cultural leadership in the widest sense.

5.2.2. Three dynamics

The interactions of the cultural sector with the government (or policy makers) and the general public can be shown schematically as part of a triangular relationship (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Culture, government and the public

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Each group is conceived broadly: ‘government’ can include local, regional and national incarnations, as well as international institutions such as those of the European Union, together with the various executive agencies operating at each of these levels. The common factor uniting these bodies is that the resources they allocate derive from tax- payers (and sometimes lottery players), implying that their decisions not only represent the public but are also accountable to it. The ‘cultural sector’, meanwhile, includes all of those organisations and individuals who may have an interest in receiving such funds and who fall within the remits of national arts, libraries and heritage agencies. The ‘public’ is all-inclusive but also heterogeneous: it is the total population that the government has a duty to serve, and it is the distinct mosaic of communities and stakeholders who make up the particular character and culture of any identifiable geographical or demographic subset within that population.

Within this model, cultural policy classically appears as an action of government directed towards the cultural sector. This is commonly expressed in terms of funding and the priorities and conditions applied to its distribution, which create a reciprocal responsibility to government from the professional sector. The sector itself produces cultural activity and engages in several ways with the public. Government requires a mandate from the public for its actions and purports to create policy in the public interest.

This model is not particularly original: a similar one is presented by John Holden (2006: 21), who uses it to illustrate the demonstrate how relationships between politicians, professionals and the public have become skewed as a result of the different types of value prioritised by each party. In Holden’s terms, building on his identification of the components of ‘cultural value’ (Holden 2004), cultural professionals cherish ‘intrinsic’ value while policy pursues the ‘instrumental’. The public, meanwhile, is interested in a combination of intrinsic and ‘institutional’ value (Holden 2006: 23-4). The latter includes the quality of engagement with the public by cultural organisations and culture’s contribution to community identity. Pascal Gielen and Thijs Lijster, meanwhile, present a slightly different version of the diagram which relates ‘economy’ to politics and culture (Gielen & Lijster 2015: 54). The three sides of their triangle therefore represent political economy, cultural economy and cultural policy, but also include the inverse constructions of ‘political culture’ and ‘economic culture’ (ibid. 54-5). Through these, Gielen and Lijster critique understandings of culture which show it as

175 secondary to political economy and highlight the ways in which politics and economics are themselves shaped by cultural values. Rather than being, in Marxist terms, part of the social superstructure, culture is instead understood as ‘the foundation of communal life’ (ibid. 55-6).

Both Holden’s model and that of Gielen and Lijster are concerned with the relationship of societal values to cultural sector activity and to the formation of cultural policy. They also indicate the dynamic nature of the relationships represented by the sides of these triangles - their two-way forms of influence - and this is what seems to me interesting in terms of the functioning of cultural leadership. Holden points out the inadequacy for modern culture of a policy-professional-public triangle operating uni-directionally, as it might have been thought to do in more deferent times, with money being given by governments to a professional sector which then delivers culture authoritatively to a grateful populace (Holden 2006: 21). In the present century this model is affected by various changes in these relationships, among which Holden identifies: public demand for cultural experiences which relate adequately to increasingly complex cultural identities (ibid. 23); a narrowing of the gap between public and private sector models of cultural provision (ibid. 25); and increased expectation for culture to deliver economic and instrumental outcomes on the part of government (ibid. 29-30), which echoes the shift noted by Caust (2003) in Australia.

The major challenges now facing the public cultural system can therefore be seen to subsist in the reciprocal lines of its traditional movement. What kind of returns to government should the cultural sector provide in exchange for financial and political support? In what ways is it possible for the public to participate in cultural life? Can the cultural sector expect the public to be engaged with its work if it is not itself engaged as part of the civic community with issues of public concern? There is a difference between delivering on the instrumental demands of public authorities and actually engaging with the public directly to understand its needs and interests. Meanwhile, the extent to which the government has a responsibility to the public in terms of cultural provision and opportunity depends on articulating the public value of culture in relation to the government’s overall remit. The publicly funded cultural sector therefore derives its social mandate not only from its own relationship with the public

176 but also from the public’s relationship with government.72 One immediate implication of this is the potential weakness of direct cultural sector advocacy of its own interests to government where there is a lack of public involvement and therefore little democratic credibility. Cultural organizations, after all, ‘are only as strong as the commitment of their audiences’ (Hewison 2014: 233-4). Another, broader, implication of this analysis is that forms of decision making and influence relevant to cultural development can be exercised from any of the three corners of the triangle. Cultural leadership, then, cannot be understood as something operating only from within the cultural sector.

Some limitations of this model need to be acknowledged. First among these is the overlapping nature of the triangle’s three corners. In this the diagram is a gross over- simplification. For example, cultural sector professionals, as Dawn Fuller has asserted (2014: 14), are also members of the public and entitled to a democratic voice. Both the ‘public’ and ‘politicians’ may play other roles within the cultural sector, whether as part- time producers, sponsors or trustees. As professionals in other sectors, some sections of the public will have additional relationships both with culture and with government. Andrew Ormston’s (2015) game of Twister needs to be applied to this picture.

72 I would argue that governmental cultural policy cannot be justified simply by the government’s election mandate because culture is generally so low on the political agenda, as Holden demonstrates by analysing the thin cultural statements included in the 2005 UK party election manifestos (2006: 27- 8). Other democratic processes are required, suggesting that discussions about cultural value need to be more than just dialogue between the funded cultural sector and government or its agencies.

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A further limitation is that the diagram only describes those parts of cultural life to which public funding is applied. This leaves out the entire commercial sector as well as many forms of amateur and grass-roots activity. It also fails to take into account other forms of subsidy, particularly private trusts and foundations, whose priorities are additional elements of cultural policy, as well as newer forms of fundraising like crowd- sourcing. The triangle is perhaps more commonly experienced, then, as a set of overlapping spheres among which individual people are mobile and sometimes occupy different spaces simultaneously. This messier but more participatory model of policy and leadership collapses into something that might look more like Figure 2. There are debates to be had about which organisations, processes or roles might be located at the intersections, in which different areas of discourse (cultural, economic, political, media) also coincide and collide.

Holden’s (2004) approach to cultural value has been criticised from an academic perspective as being ‘shaped by an advocacy agenda’ and focussed on establishing justification for public funding (Belfiore & Bennett 2008: 10). The implication is that such research starts from the assumption that state intervention is a good thing and sets out to prove the benefits of subsidy. Whether or not this line of critique is accurate it does not invalidate Holden’s analysis of the forms of value involved in the cultural system and of the essential forms of relationship between culture, the public and politics. Still, it should be recognised that all these analyses are tied to the conditions of western democracy. Holden’s work (2004; 2006) relates specifically to the UK while Gielen and Lijster (2015: 55) make clear that they derive, from their model, a role for culture particular to European democratic systems. Even this range of settings comprises significant structural and resource variations but they at least have in common an established history of state patronage linked to some elements of the ‘positive’ tradition of culture in public life (Belfiore & Bennett 2007).73 In most cases the critical role of culture in public life is accepted, or at least tolerated. The operation of cultural leadership will apply in very different ways in the various political contexts

73 It might appear that, with larger overall budgets available, a country such as the UK is on a different footing to former Eastern bloc nations and smaller European states. However, statistics published by the Budapest cultural observatory show that the UK actually has one of the lowest levels of investment in culture in the European Union in terms of cultural expenditure as a proportion of GDP, with only the stricken nation of Greece committing less (Regional Observatory on Financing Culture in East-Central Europe 2015). This too is a question of cultural leadership, but such information rarely appears in media discourse around domestic cultural expenditure.

178 around the globe in which it is now being discussed, where the spheres of the Venn diagram may be very differently configured.

Some of the ideas arising from this analysis can be taken further. One is that there is a societal dimension of cultural leadership which corresponds to the ‘public sphere’ engagements of the Artist as Leader (Douglas & Fremantle 2009: 31). Furthermore, cultural leadership appears as something taking place beyond simply the actions of individual cultural sector leaders. With modern cultural forms characterised by ‘contingency’ and modern democratic conditions requiring higher levels of public engagement, there is a gap between ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’. There is also a link between the ‘democratic deficit’ and the legitimacy of public support for culture and the arts (Holden 2006: 12). Culture’s connections with government and the public sphere begin to open up how cultural leadership operates as a process. In particular, it becomes apparent that forces of influence work in multiple directions, making it impossible to work in a self-contained organisational or artistic bubble without losing social relevance. Cultural action can impact on society, as the Artist as Leader research has shown, but external developments shape cultural practice in turn. New contexts generate new perspectives and call for fresh responses.

5.3. A framework for cultural leadership

These additional forms of influence on the circumstances of cultural development can be coupled with the domains of action in which the Artist as Leader has been shown to operate, suggesting an expanded model for the processes of cultural leadership (see Figure 3).

In this framework, spheres of action and influence are interlinked, as cultural leadership is understood to consist of not only the activities of sectoral leaders but also the external and systemic forces to which they are subjected. To pick up the metaphor of navigation used by both Hoyle (2014: 16) and Rossello (2014: 5), these influences are the winds, tides and other vessels according to which a leader’s course must be

179 plotted and constantly recalibrated. In theoretical terms, the interactions between the different spheres reflect the extent to which cultural leadership is constructed socially and discursively (Fairhurst & Grant 2010).

Figure 3: Spheres of cultural leadership

5.3.1. Spheres of action

The Artist as Leader report distinguished three ‘scenarios’ in which leadership by artists can be seen to take place: through the art work, in organisations, and in the public sphere (Douglas & Fremantle 2009: 24-36). Artists lead artistically to the extent that they may become influential in the development of their creative form, whether as

180 technical innovators, aesthetic agenda-setters or exemplars of creative intelligence. They participate in an ongoing exchange with other artists, through ‘deep, critical knowledge’ of their field (ibid: 37), responding to preceding work and contributing new possibilities. Their influence may be local or it may be global; it might be confined to one area of aesthetic practice (an innovation in poetic form, for example) or it might have significance across different artistic disciplines (contributing, perhaps, to the emergence of wider aesthetic movements, or to hybrid forms). This sphere of action is represented at the top left of the diagram. It may not necessarily be intended as leadership and, as observed above (5.1.1.), many artists will not readily identify as leaders, but the resonance of their work may still fit an understanding of ‘result-based leadership’ where influence is revealed post facto through the response of others (Grint 2005: 23-6). Also potentially in this sphere (although this may be a matter for debate and will often overlap with ‘organisational’ activity) is the action of establishing or operating venues, studios and other dedicated cultural platforms, thereby shaping cultural and aesthetic experience through the choices made in defining, laying out and equipping such spaces. In whatever way such leadership is realised, this is a dimension of expertise where artists and cultural producers create change through the fact and nature of their practice. It must be considered an important part of cultural leadership because it is directly affects aesthetic development and cultural form. However, while there is obviously plenty of specialist education and training dedicated to the development of artistic skills and techniques, this role of artists and other creative specialists as influencers of cultural development is minimally identified with cultural leadership as developed in policy discourse and leadership training.

Artists lead organisationally, meanwhile, whenever they play a role in forming, shaping and operating the structures and institutions necessary to continue the work of their sector (Douglas & Fremantle 2009: 26-8). As the interviews and the literature have indicated, this is the primary site of cultural leadership in policy and training discourse (Hewison 2004; Kay 2010; Rossello 2014). It is represented in the centre left segment of the diagram. The activities of non-artist leaders within arts organisations and leaders of all kinds within other cultural institutions, such as museums and libraries, take place in this sphere. Indeed, in the dominant discourse, the term ‘cultural leader’ is generally shorthand for just such a non-artist organisational leader within the cultural sector. This distinct identity allows Roanne Dods, for example, in describing a process of research conducted for the Cultural Leadership Programme, to observe that: ‘we

181 focussed not just on organisations but on artists as well as cultural leaders in a more traditional, classic form’ (Dods 2014: 1); similarly, Cluny Macpherson identifies cultural leadership as something ‘that in cultural organisations their Chief Executives might do’ as opposed to ‘a different sort of thing which is probably artistic leadership’ (Macpherson 2014: 1). The term also appears in its shorthand sense in at least two other interviews (Ormston 2014: 8; Rossello 2014: 5). Elsewhere, however, the necessity of leaders to be tied to either to organisations or senior executive positions within them is challenged (Hoyle 2014b: 2), as is the separation of artistic leadership from Chief Executive-type roles (Spiers 2014: 16). Clearly, as the Artist as Leader research shows, artists can be key actors in this area. It is a sphere of action, not a category of people. Again, some tension is revealed in terms of the place of the artist within the discourse of cultural leadership.

Artists also lead in the public or social sphere – in the bottom left of the diagram - when their activities influence the wider culture of which they are a part. This includes their role in shaping local and national identity, whether as symbolic figures in themselves (such as Burns in Scotland or Sibelius in Finland) or through the phrases, themes and characters from their work that become shared reference points for a society, part of its patterns of language and thought. This social influence can also include more overt political interventions, whether through messages built into the work of art itself (as in the drama of Brecht), or through the public status of the artist highlighting an issue or campaign (as in the example of Live Aid). If an artist operating in this way is a cultural leader, then the concept of cultural leadership must be extended into this sphere. It is clear that cultural sector leaders other than artists can also be significant actors in this sphere through the civil society roles of cultural organisations and the ways in which they produce institutional value (Holden 2006). It is therefore a key area of cultural leadership in terms of how culture is valued by the public and appears as highly valued among the research interviewees – even as a key site of responsibility (Brining 2014: 11; Ormston 2014: 5; Spiers 2014: 9). However, as with the artistic sphere of action, it appears to be suppressed within the primary discourses of cultural leadership.

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5.3.2. Spheres of influence

The three areas on the right hand side of the diagram represent the forms of influence coming from outside the cultural sector which strongly affect the conditions in which it operates. This includes the role of individuals and institutions whose primary professional identities are located in other sectors but whose actions have significant implications for cultural development. It also includes collective behaviours and social forces not identifiable with individuals or particular organisations. The sphere of influence which corresponds to artistic practice (top right) is partly made of responses to it, such as relationships with audiences and project participants or interactions with producers and creative collaborators. The creative actions of other artists-as-leaders feed back into practice as influence here too. Artists also respond at an aesthetic level to developments in technology which regularly change the material basis of their art work and the nature of relationships with audiences. The innovations of engineers and computer programmers begin new cultural actions and artists contribute to their never- complete continuation. Such developments also open up new struggles for creative autonomy and freedom of access with the commercial or political interests driving ownership and distribution, as Raymond Williams once noted in relation to the late 20th century’s evolving broadcast media (Williams 1990: 147-152).

The sphere of influence at organisational level (centre right) includes the financial, legal, political and operational circumstances affecting governance and organisational development. The possibilities and limitations for cultural organisations are strongly affected by input and requirements from each of these areas. These issues are not merely contextual but are encountered as active interventions in the business of cultural organisations, though initiated outside of the sector and not necessarily targeted at it. Examples would include the pressure on voluntary organisations to adopt charitable models (Glass 2014: 10-11) which is encountered by a company like Phoenix Dance as the imperative to develop its board structure when first in receipt of Arts Council funding (Adair 2007: 116-122). Other areas of indirect cultural policy affect the capacities of cultural organisations, from international trade agreements down to local decisions on business rate exemptions, therefore influencing the scale and even the content of the sector’s work. François Matarasso asks, for example: ‘… why do we have no VAT on new buildings and VAT on building restorations? That’s a fundamental plank of heritage policy, but it’s not seen as that. It’s simply seen as a bit

183 of taxation policy’ (Matarasso 2013: 10). Such decisions are also part of the fabric of cultural leadership to the extent that it is understood as ‘process’ and ‘result’ (Grint 2005). If cultural leadership is discursively limited to the actions of sector-specific ‘cultural leaders’ these broader forms of cultural formation risk being hidden. The influence of sponsors, local authority planning departments, transport networks, health and safety legislation or customs and visa restrictions are apparent at various times in the cultural sector. The extent to which any one of these should be considered an area of cultural leadership is debatable – but I suggest that the debate should at least be opened up wherever the development of cultural leadership is under serious consideration.

The final segment of the diagram is the social sphere of influence (bottom right). This covers those external cultural factors which affect individuals as well as organisations and colour the public experience of cultural provision across all forms and contexts. Public attitudes to culture are shaped by a multitude of political, educational and societal factors. Teachers, religious leaders, scientists, environmental activists, parents, the media and civic leaders all contribute to the intellectual and moral space in which culture is produced and encountered. Norms, niceties, traditions and taboos are socially generated, and these form additional discursive contexts in which the potential meaning and reception of cultural work takes shape. Artists and other cultural actors may themselves be influential in confronting, reinforcing or simply playing with these elements, whether in their civic lives (the social sphere of action) or their creative lives (the artistic sphere of action). Social influences and demands therefore feed back into action at different levels in this model. Sometimes these will include clear acts of cultural leadership by non-cultural sector actors, such as if a religious or political leader declares an artist or their work to be holy, blasphemous, treasonable or patriotic. As with organisational influence, it is probably less important whether any particular instance ‘qualifies’ as cultural leadership than to recognise that the concept cannot be fully understood, either as a process or a personal capacity, without recognition of this social dimension.

The interactions of the spheres identified in this diagram are not restricted to ‘horizontal’ exchanges between corresponding forms of action and influence. As has already been seen, social influences also affect artistic possibilities and demand responses from organisations. Audience responses to artworks affect organisational

184 relationships; governance issues can affect public trust on the one hand or the scope for artistic adventurousness on the other. This is a sketch of a dynamic human process, not a blueprint for machinery. However, extending the Artist as Leader analysis to include these spheres of influence is intended as a frame for understanding cultural leadership as a systemic process which both includes and exceeds the activities and attributes of particular individuals.

5.4 Summary

Leadership has developed conceptually in post-Enlightenment democratic society as a rational basis for the exercise of power and authority. It can be understood as one element in the story of human action, from which it has been unhelpfully separated in the quest for the ‘strong man’ (Arendt 1998: 188), but within which it depends on relationships, responses and social processes for its successful operation (Grint 2005: 115). To retain its rational basis, the operation of leadership must be self-aware and self-critical. In supporting culture, meanwhile, modern society invests in the ‘positive tradition’ of thinking about cultural impact (Belfiore & Bennett 2008: 143-5), whether out of concern for intrinsic values, as articulated in post-war cultural policy, or in the more recent pursuit of economic and instrumental outcomes (Holden 2006: 19). Culture, and modern art in particular, has an uneasy relationship with authority, with which it needs to maintain a critical relationship, even - or particularly - when in receipt of patronage and official support. Post-auratic and post-academic art has to continually reinvent its relationship with society and its structures. The contingent nature of art demands that artists step outside of their immediate sphere of action to engage with the public realm. Through such encounters artists become actors and initiators in social processes while being themselves influenced and reshaped in a dialectical exchange. These complex and sometimes delicate relationships, meanwhile, depend substantially on the intangible quality of trust, particularly if culture’s critical role is to be allowed to apply to the system which supports it. Trust can be driven out of the cultural system through breakdowns of communication or clashes of value, creating significant systemic problems either between authorities and the cultural sector or between the sector and the public. The Creative Scotland ‘stooshie’ is a stark instance of such a failure in relation to authority (Stevenson 2014) while the wider ‘crisis of legitimacy’

185 often understood to be facing the cultural sector arises from its relationship with the public (Hewison 2006: 35; Holden 2006: 12-13). Trust is the oil in the machinery of cultural policy and leadership, each of which work substantially more smoothly and productively when it is present than when it is not. These relationships between the cultural sector, the government and the public, under the conditions of democracy and within a publicly funded model, need to operate as dynamic processes of exchange if the system is to retain legitimacy. Cultural leadership can materialise as a form of action or influence within any part of it. As a process, cultural leadership can be understood as operating in spheres of action and influence corresponding to the Artist as Leader domains of artistic or cultural practice, organisations and the public realm. This kind of understanding emerges strongly from the leadership experiences discussed in the research interviews, but the construction of cultural leadership policy discourse is more constrained, where ‘cultural leaders’ are commonly understood to be those with non-artistic responsibilities working within cultural organisations. The framework outlined in this chapter aims to account for cultural leadership in terms of its ‘hybrid’ nature, identifying it with processes and results as well as people and positions (Grint 2005: 19-31). It suggests also that those who are identified as leaders within the cultural sector need to be conversant with these additional dimensions if they are to communicate their work fluently across relevant social, political and institutional contexts.

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Chapter 6: Conclusions

6.1. Locating cultural leadership

This research has explored cultural leadership as a formation constituted by and constitutive of discourse (2.2.1 above). The framework produced in chapter 5 conceptualises cultural leadership as a hybrid process of exchange among corresponding spheres of action and influence (5.3). These articulations extend significantly beyond even a broad definition of the cultural sector. The relationship of cultural sector actors not only to political structures but also to public discourse is crucial to the operation of this process, particularly if cultural leaders are to play important critical roles in civil society (5.1).

Many other discursive formations intersect with and shape the concept of cultural leadership. Managerial imperatives such as flexibility and change (4.10.1), resilience and sustainability (3.7; 4.3.3) and efficiency or value for money (4.5.4; 5.2.1) combine with creative industries discourse (3.5.2; 4.3.2) or narratives of cultural participation (3.5.3; 4.9.1) to generate new orthodoxies in professional practice. Meanwhile, leadership discourse itself, with its component theories from ‘transformational’ to ‘relational’ (3.6), strongly influences what cultural leadership is understood to mean, especially in relation to organisations, and what is expected of a sectoral ‘leader’. Where leadership is understood as only one aspect of a more integrated idea of ‘action’, however, awareness of its systemic and relational processes can serve as a check on expectations of the ‘heroic’ individual (2.2.3; 4.2.4).

Cultural leadership continues to be a significant area of investment and development in the UK and internationally (1.1; 3.4.3). This chapter considers some of the implications going forward of the themes that have been discussed, including what might now be meant by cultural leadership and the continuing value of the concept. Some limitations of the research are acknowledged and further directions suggested.

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6.1.1. Hybrid content, relational style

The framework for cultural leadership proposed in Chapter 5 is intended to offer a broader way of thinking about the concept which goes beyond the role of individual leaders working within the cultural sector. Cultural development is understood to be socially constructed as well as professionally produced, asserting a fundamental connection between the ‘anthropological’ and ‘refinement’ senses of culture (1.4.1 above). A ‘hybrid’ form of leadership emerges, composed of processes and their outcomes as much as people and their functions (Grint 2005: 21-23). Even to the extent that key aspects of action and influence are associated with particular individuals these actors do not necessarily occupy cultural sector roles as a primary identity. Conversely, the leadership function of cultural sector professionals is by no means limited to their immediate institutional or sectoral context. However, the discourse of cultural leadership, in the UK and internationally, has been largely produced through the development of training programmes which by their nature are concerned with the skills and competences of individuals, particularly as applied to organisational settings. The Clore programme in particular has looked to move beyond this by continually reviewing its ideas of what a cultural leader might be, which has led to new forms of delivery and recruitment such as the Artist Fellowships (Hoyle 2014b: 13). It also pays attention to the importance of collective experience and building relationships by foregrounding inter-sectoral experience within the fellowships (ibid. 13- 14) and by the development of its alumni network, particularly through its follow-on Clore Plus courses (http://www.cloreleadership.org/cloreplus.aspx). Even so, the roles played by cultural leaders in social and aesthetic development, and the external political and social influences on cultural action, appear at best as secondary concerns in the prevailing order of discourse of cultural leadership.

The research also suggests that the concept of leadership can be usefully rethought in relation to Arendt’s conception of action as one element in an open ended, dynamic process of human interrelationship, rather than a fixed site of authority and responsibility. Some of the processes of engagement described in the research interviews can be read as attempts to grapple with this challenge of reintegrating leadership within action. These include Space 2’s efforts to develop co-designed models of work with communities (Fuller & Tregidden 2014: 3-4), the process of articulating self-defined organisational values at Aberdeen Performing Arts (Spiers

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2014: 4) and Creative Scotland’s early stage testing of strategic themes for its ten year plan through reference groups and other forms of consultation (Archer 2014b: 4-5). There are ethical and also aesthetic implications which arise from this, as the principles are no longer set by the beginner or hierarchical leader, but are constantly negotiated through processes of action and reaction. This has the potential to create significant tensions, especially in situations where personal ethics tend towards democratic and inclusive practices but the available organisational structures remain hierarchical, or where there is pressure to articulate fixed positions, definitions or standards, such as to funders or other stakeholders. The implementation of a relational style of leadership is not necessarily straightforward but its value within the cultural sector can be significant, as has been noted by previous writers (Hewison 2006: 57; Leicester 2010: 18; Summerton 2010: 118). However, it should not be idealised at the expense of recognising the continued prevalence of more traditional styles within many cultural sector organisations and processes.

6.1.2. Culture and charisma

Much of the experience articulated by training providers, cultural sector leaders and arts policy makers in this research suggests that we should be trying to develop the relational capacities of leaders so that they can get the best from the people around them and work effectively with the wide range of stakeholders they are likely to encounter. This also seems to be a way to reintegrate leadership with the plurality of human action and the processes of achievement that depend on others. However, it is also clear that fluency with different leadership styles suited to different situations is a requirement of professional versatility, as reflected in the experience of interviewees (Hoyle 2014b: 9; Spiers 2014: 14) and identified within critical leadership literature (Fairhurst 2011: 187-9). Cultural leadership cannot be simply equated with relational leadership, and it is inadequate to suggest that relational leadership is somehow the most distinctly ‘cultural’ form of leadership, as if cultural work somehow produces a new style. For many the most distinct kind of cultural leader is still the charismatic individual, and there is an instinct to make such figures exemplary within the sector – whether it’s Jude Kelly fronting the Cultural Leadership Programme’s introductory video (Fernando 2006) or the place of Daniel Barenboim within the Artist as Leader

189 research and performance programmes (Douglas & Fremantle 2009). As Hewison notes, heroic leadership ‘has been highly valued in the cultural sector. Such figures exercise command and control, and exude a charisma that increases in proportion to the distance kept between the leader and the led’ (Hewison 2004: 163). This can be related to the short term pressures and the desire for quick results produced by the environment in which many cultural organisations work (ibid.).

Such individuals become exemplary because they are understood to be effective and/or inspirational. It is no good saying that these are the ‘wrong’ kind of leader – their charisma is hardly a negative quality, even though it may be associated with ‘heroic’ models of leadership which development programmes may not choose to promote. Indeed, it is a quality which clearly contributes strongly to the development of relationships and there is nothing to stop individuals having both charismatic qualities and relational abilities. What is also clear, however, is that while training and development programmes can enhance abilities they cannot install innate personal qualities. It is reasonable for course leaders to assume that the truly charismatic probably don’t need much help in projecting their personalities, while the rest of us are better off concentrating on a few techniques. Nonetheless, cultural leadership theory needs to be able to account for charisma. Inspiration, after all, is part of what organisations say they want from their leaders (Hewison 2004: 162) and charismatic leaders appear to provide it freely.

Three key limitations of charismatic leadership should be mentioned. One, briefly alluded to by Hewison (ibid.), is that a disproportionate focus on the charismatic individual drives out teamwork while the leader becomes sole decision maker. This tips organisational culture towards what Grint has characterised as ‘destructive consent’ (Grint 2005: 37), in which uncritical agreement with the leader’s judgement and an inability to challenge the dominant narrative ultimately weakens the decision making process, reduces shared ownership and saps morale. Another, related to the first, is that charisma can have its dark side, when personality is asserted ruthlessly or aggressively to ensure obedience through fear and submission more than loyalty (Grint 2005: 44-5; Muhr 2011: 151). This is one of the mechanisms through which a healthy critical culture of ‘constructive dissent’ can be driven out of an organisation or system (Grint 2005: 108-9). A third limitation is that organisations can become dazzled by the charisma at the expense of sorting out structural issues. Short term successes mask

190 more fundamental issues while both problems and their perceived solutions become associated with leadership and personality, resulting in too little attention being paid to the underlying system (Hewison 2004: 163; Alvesson 2011: 68).

Charismatic leadership is therefore ill-equipped to deliver the elasticity and self-critical capacity for reinvention implied by the contemporary demand for resilience. In terms of cultural leadership development, this suggests that sectoral leaders should understand the limitations of charismatic style but also that there is a need to understand the appetite for it within their organisations. This applies particularly at times of opportunity and vulnerability such as recruitment and restructuring where the values and assumptions built into organisational governance can either be challenged or reinforced. Examples from the interviews illustrate this in different ways, whether its James Brining (2014: 3) as a new Artistic Director being challenged by funders to make organisational change among longstanding staff members; Jane Spiers (2014: 15) working with her board to establish a fresh organisational culture through changes to her management team; or Sharon Watson (2014: 6) trying to establish consistent company values among new staff members and incoming artists. As a governance issue, moreover, this question is relevant to trustees and funding organisations as much as to executive leaders within cultural organisations, as it is their expectations and demands which define the size and shape of leadership needs which companies set out to fill.

6.1.3. The place of the artist in cultural leadership

The model outlined in Figure 3 (5.3 above) borrows from the analysis of the Artist as Leader (Douglas & Fremantle 2009) as a basis for broader conceptualisation of cultural leadership. In extending the model to include the dynamic relationship between influence and action it suggests some reciprocal implications for artists, particularly in relation to the idea of autonomy. The Artist as Leader research had already emphasised the relational aspects of artistic influence, as Matarasso (2012) has noted in an essay, but the constant interplay between the spheres of cultural leadership highlights the contingency of artistic practice in relation to external forces shaping aesthetic, organisational and social contexts. This demonstrates that policies or

191 practices which treat any one sphere as a self-contained zone will inevitably overestimate the independent agency of those acting within it. This applies equally to the sphere of artistic action. This is not to argue that practice or its aesthetic content is socially determined, but to acknowledge that it cannot be socially or politically insulated. It may be obvious in post-modern times to make this observation, but the question remains of what to do about it.

One possible way for artists to retrieve some kind of practical autonomy is through critical engagement with the influences that shape their work and by working to reveal and understand them. This kind of argument is made by Pascal Gielen under the title Autonomy via heteronomy (2015b: 117-126), where he posits a sociological understanding of autonomy in relation to art which is more about self-determination than isolation or purity. Gielen discusses the financial basis of artistic practice, critiquing the view that artists must maintain total economic autonomy to have art world credibility or ‘symbolic credit’ (ibid. 120). This, he argues, is essentially false in a world where ‘even the most autonomous of artists needs to eat’ and where ‘not only artists but all individuals must navigate through quite a few social domains in order to survive’ (ibid.). Gielen rejects the ‘relative autonomy’ of these domains (for example, economic, artistic, educational and legal), asserting instead the necessarily heterogeneous identity of an artist and their work as produced by this navigation. He proposes that in this reality the only meaningful form of autonomy is to ensure that ‘an artist’s sources are as heterogeneous as possible’, which sets up a defence of public subsidy as a diversification of resources and a buffer to total dependence on the market (ibid. 121).

There is danger, of course, in artists being pulled in so many different directions. While they might avoid domination by any one economic stakeholder, artists risk become the bus conductors of their own practices, so busy selling tickets to all-comers that in the end no one is driving. However, Gielen at least conceptualises a strategic response to the heteronomous reality in which many artists already make their living, as evidenced by the dilemmas around funding and agency reported by many of my interviewees (4.5.3 above). What could be added here is a better critical awareness of the surrounding conditions. The spheres of cultural leadership should therefore also be seen as heteronomous, implying that for an artist or anyone else to act with any kind of autonomy among them demands awareness and understanding of the forms of

192 influence at work. This calls for analytical engagement with the social and economic contexts underpinning cultural life on the part of artists and other cultural producers. Even to reveal a mess of values and interests at least creates the possibility of taking a morally autonomous position in relation to them - to make informed choices - whatever the actual or perceived power of the individual artist to challenge the system in which they work.

6.2. Policy, leadership and value

6.2.1. Policy and uncertainty

Public policy, in aiming to produce desired outcomes through co-ordinated intervention in human affairs, can be seen as a response to a central feature of Arendt’s characterisation of action - its unpredictability (Arendt 1998: 190). Policy attempts to exert control over the direction of action, forming part of the ‘steering mechanism of society’ (Considine 2001: 16). The creation of policy is a significant form of leadership in any sector, partly because it assumes the authority of envisioning the future and particularly because it sets in motion action which others must complete. It works explicitly through action’s ‘plurality’ (Arendt 1998: 190). Unfortunately, however, its attempts to escape unpredictability are often fraught to say the least. The outcomes of policy are frequently uncertain and can even be directly counter-productive (Sieber 1981). Cultural policy makers therefore need to understand the subtleties of how influence and action relate in the processes of cultural leadership if their interventions are to engage effectively with action’s ‘boundlessness’ (Arendt 1998: 191). Acknowledging and engaging with unpredictability rather than always trying to conquer it might lead to approaches focused less on driving towards predetermined outcomes (and being concerned with set measures of achievement) and more on a dynamic engagement with public and professional responses.

An attempt to work with this principle can be seen in the use of ‘artistic vibrancy’ by Australia Council for the Arts (2014) in its monitoring and decision making processes. As described by the body’s Executive Director for Arts Strategy, Wendy Were, this attempts to go beyond box-ticking to achieve ‘meaningful measurement’ of arts

193 organisations’ intangible achievements - a way of talking about ‘artistic impact’ rather than economic or other instrumental impacts - on the basis that ‘measures must match the organisation’s mission’.74 The success of subsidised organisations is to be assessed in terms of their own declarations of intent rather than the demands and targets of the funder. The approach rejects a ‘cause and effect’ model of cultural policy, arguing that the role of cultural agencies is to create the conditions for artistic vibrancy, which is defined in terms of critical self-awareness and openness to change as much as artistic vision or traditional measures of quality (Australia Council for the Arts 2014: 37-41). In principle, at least, this is an innovation in policy because it concentrates on process and public value ahead of specific results while trusting the sector to know its own business. It does not depend on prediction and therefore makes room for the dynamics of action. However, it remains to be seen whether this initiative will survive the controversial approach of the current Australian government.75

Working with a better understanding of the relationship between influence and action should allow policy makers to be more effective in achieving their stated aims. However, this does not mean that their initiatives therefore become ‘better’ policy, certainly not in a moral sense. Questions of value still need to be foregrounded in policy discourse and therefore in cultural leadership discourse. What arguably makes policy more legitimate is to maximise the level of meaningful public engagement in development and decision making. The cultural sector also derives legitimacy from the extent and nature of its public engagement and this is a major leadership issue. Policy is ultimately about the prioritisation of some social values over others. Cutting arts funding in a time of economic difficulty is a simple if stark example of how this becomes apparent within cultural policy (Bell & Oakley 2015: 7). A major function of cultural leadership in relation to policy is therefore to be part of public debates about value. This opens up questions of how cultural leadership extends outside cultural organisations and beyond the cultural sector, including its interactions with government and the public. A central challenge for a policy process that wants to be not just democratic but effective is how to engage with plurality in the design and critique of its measures and not just through their implementation.

74 As described by Were in an unpublished talk during ‘The Art of Valuing’, an IETM Satellite Meeting at de Buren, Brussels on 18 February 2015 (author’s notes). 75 The May 2015 reassignment of significant funds from the arm’s-length Australia Council for the Arts funds to a new National Program for Excellence in the Arts at the behest of the Arts Minister has caused significant controversy and uncertainty. See for example: http://theconversation.com/philosophy-vs- evidence-is-no-way-to-orchestrate-cultural-policy-42487 (accessed 16 November 2015).

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6.2.2. Translation and articulation

Several interviewees in the study make reference to their work as a process of ‘translation’ between the worlds of policy and practice (Archer 2014b: 6; Macpherson 2014: 3; Ward 2014: 12) or of being a ‘conduit’ between organisational settings (Watson 2014: 22); I have also found myself describing my own work in similar terms in the course of the interview process (Marriott 2013: 1; Archer 2014b: 14). This recalls Cooren and Fairhurst’s (2003) discussion of translation as a key part of sense making in leaders’ constructions of narrative. In this analysis, a situation or discourse is shown to make sense when the ‘insertion’ within it of a goal or initiative creates a link to other situations or discourses, producing ‘conditions for a specific way of interpreting the sense or meaning of a specific event’ (Cooren & Fairhurst 2003: 87). An ‘articulation’ has been created, allowing understanding of the effect of movement in one situation upon the other (ibid.). For example, a leader in a cultural organisation must be able to locate its purpose within the discourse of funders and other stakeholders. A strategic organisation must be able to translate the intention of policy into the language of the sector whose contribution is vital for its achievement. In my experience, a city arts officer must also be able to map the activities of arts organisations and cultural projects back onto the strategic objectives of the authority. In each case it then becomes possible to propose courses of action which take into account the articulated context, generating appropriate alliances and navigating potential barriers in pursuit of the initiative.

This depends, however, on there being a point of connection in terms of values between the different forms of discourse. From this point of view, a lack of ability in translation between business and cultural discourse appears as a key problem in the Creative Scotland ‘stooshie’ previously referred to (Archer 2014b: 3; Stevenson 2014). The process of translation often highlights the fact that certain concepts do not have equivalent terms in different languages. Sue Hoyle’s (2014b: 16) experience with the concept of ‘leadership’ in Mandarin and Cantonese illustrates this. Translation is a generative process and it depends on reception as well as transmission, like any other form of action. It emerges as a key skill for contemporary cultural sector leaders as they navigate the relationships between different spheres of action and influence. Policy itself is subject to the vagaries of translation as its original meanings and values are converted into the available idioms of action. The process of translation requires

195 leaders to take ‘articulated’ action, communicating the values of one sphere in the terms of another, managing the knock-on effects of new understandings and responses.

6.2.3. Policy and training

Cultural policy is made, as Philip Schlesinger has observed, at the intersection of culture and politics, and at the boundaries between the private and public domains.76 Policy intervenes in structural issues and collective processes, which training is primarily a way of creating change at the level of the individual. Individuals can of course be agents of change in institutions and systems, but ‘it requires collective as well as individual effort to change the culture of an organisation’ (Hewison 2006: 16). For this reason any form of change at the individual level which training may be designed to produce is unlikely to be fully realised unless the issue is also addressed within policy. This may simply be the operational policy of a particular organisation or the public directives of a national cultural system, but in either case the demands made of individuals should be matched by collective commitment if any given process is to have integrity.

Cultural leadership, through Clore’s initiative, has been one of a handful of UK cultural policy concerns driven and defined by private initiative more than by government (Gordon & Stark 2010: 3.b.ii.2). Clore initiated cultural leadership development after 2002 and, following the rise and fall of government-directed provision with the Cultural Leadership Programme, continues to dominate it now. Where public sector investment in cultural leadership remains it predominantly goes through Clore as the expert provider. This includes the Arts Council England (2012) funding for Developing Resilient Leadership, some individual Fellowship places supported by the Arts Council of Wales, Creative Scotland and Arts Council Ireland, and support for academic research by Clore Fellows from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.77 Most

76 As described by Schlesinger in an unpublished talk during ‘Policy Stories’, an event of the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh on 19 November 2015 (author’s notes). 77 These and other domestic funding relationships are acknowledged at http://www.cloreleadership.org/UK-and-Ireland.aspx (accessed 21 November 2013).

196 other leadership training in the UK is provided by the FE/HE sector and business schools while there is a scattering of provision by professional bodies in the cultural sector as well as in-house programmes run by large institutions such as the BBC (TBR 2013: 12). There is a case for establishing some form of structured critical dialogue between the realm of public policy and this largely independent support for individual leadership development. This could explore to what extent the more innovative or forward looking approaches to cultural leadership and development are either helped or hindered by the structures of the cultural system. Is the system flexible enough to support micro-businesses and flexible project formats, for instance? Or is it still wedded to the ‘charity’ model of cultural sector governance (Glass 2014: 10)? What experiments could be conducted at a policy level which might support the best practice being identified and developed in the training sector? Is ‘good’ leadership practice as defined by the training providers being rewarded or punished through existing systemic and institutional processes? These are some of the questions which could be taken forward to be addressed at professional level within the UK cultural sector.

6.3. The evolution of cultural leadership

6.3.1. A continuing crisis

A crisis of cultural leadership was diagnosed by Robert Hewison and John Holden in 2002, defined specifically in terms of the skills available to major cultural institutions at senior executive level and the ability of the sector to develop and retain them (Hewison & Holden 2002; Hewison 2004). Significant action and investment was proposed and delivered in response, with initiatives such as the Clore Leadership Programme, the Cultural Leadership Programme and Cultural Leadership International at the forefront. Despite the cut backs and changes resulting from the global economic crisis and the political shift within the UK from New Labour to the coalition and Conservative administrations, leadership development has remained a policy concern at national and international level (Arts Council England 2012; TBR 2013; see also 3.4.3 above). The government funded Cultural Leadership Programme may have disappeared, but the Clore programme continues to thrive and diversify and wields increasing international influence. Other forms of training and professional development for

197 artists, arts managers, cultural sector professionals and fundraisers have also developed (TBR 2013: 12-14), and new concepts such as cultural entrepreneurship have emerged in response to changing financial environments (Kuhlke, Schramme & Kooyman 2015).

These professions can no longer complain of a lack of recognition or specialist provision when it comes to its support and development needs, even though individuals and organisations alike may well struggle to find the time and financial resources to take advantage of the relevant opportunities – which is one area where the situation now may not be much different to a decade or so ago. A recent review of Scotland’s Cultural Enterprise Office notes this point and the difficulties for individuals and organisations of sustaining investment in training and development, which provides another reason why further engagement between current training provision and policy is needed (Schlesinger, Selfe & Munro 2015: 72). It is worth noting that the fundamental challenge originally identified by Hewison in diagnosing the ‘crisis’ of cultural leadership was one of morale - stemming from low pay, declining status and lack of government funding - leading to uncertain career structures which undermined the purpose of training and willingness to invest (Hewison 2004). If the picture in terms of specific and relevant training provision has since been substantially improved, the background issues of funding pressure and job security have not only remained but intensified. Public revenue for cultural organisations continues to shrink, and even among the grant sources that remain there is a demand for testing ‘new business and management models’, as prioritised within the European Commission’s Creative Europe programme, that can demonstrate the inventiveness and resilience demanded by changing financial circumstances.78

Many of the circumstances that produced the sense of crisis in cultural management at the turn of the millennium are therefore being replicated, if not exceeded. Some of the symptoms are worryingly familiar, particularly the 2015 crisis at English National Opera and associated speculation over its home theatre, the Coliseum (Fairman 2015; Richens 2015).79 Any response to the current situation must, however, also seek to

78 From the guidelines for Creative Europe’s Co-operation Projects: http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/creative- europe/actions/culture/cooperation-projects (accessed 23 November 2015). 79 Fairman’s (2015) article alludes to concerns over the viability of the 2,358 seat Coliseum as ENO’s home, echoing the 1997 crisis which saw the resignation of ENO General Director Dennis Marks over his proposal that the company should leave (Hewison 2014: 26). In tandem with problems at the Royal

198 understand and deal with what has changed, particularly in respect of the position of culture in public and political life. In the 1980s the UK cultural sector learned to demonstrate its economic value and under New Labour it battled to prove its social effectiveness. In the austerity era that has prevailed since 2010 it seems that neither these arguments nor any others offer protection against the continual process of cuts, and given that the 2015 UK General Election manifestos showed no national party other than the Greens making any commitment to reversing them, it will take more than a simple swing of the political pendulum for this to change.80 Similar trajectories are established elsewhere in Europe, particularly the Netherlands (Gielen 2015b: 121). State funded services now only seem likely to survive where there is politically tangible public pressure for continued government support, often in the form of concerted campaigns. In this environment, who will speak up for culture?

If the crisis of cultural leadership in 2002 could be defined as a professional problem demanding to be addressed at the level of the cultural sector, the continuing leadership crisis concerns the public status of culture and needs to be addressed within the public realm. Questions about who the cultural sector represents and what should be expected in return for public subsidy are not going to go away, and nor are they going to be resolved on the public’s behalf by the would-be beneficiaries of the funding system. These are questions of value, meaning and identity, and while the role of the cultural sector inevitably remains crucial to such debates its future depends on not seeing them as purely internal affairs. The sector needs to better understand the dynamics of its spheres of influence if it is to survive in a political and social environment that will no longer grant it a self-contained sphere of action. Cultural leadership is not only exercised by leaders in the cultural sector, just as the motion of a ship is not only determined by its engines, indispensable though they may be. Among the challenges for sectoral leaders going forward - whether artists, managers, trustees or anyone else - is to chart their position amid the movements of these spheres, and to learn to navigate accordingly.

Opera House in 1997-8 this was one of the earliest among the series of crises that made Clore Duffield’s review of cultural leadership necessary in the first place (Hewison 2004: 158). 80 http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/news/arts-council-news/summary-party-manifestos-what-they-mean- arts-cultu/ (accessed 1 August 2015). For additional perspective, re Britain’s lowly position in Europe in terms of cultural investment as a proportion of GDP, see note 73 in 5.2.2 above.

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6.3.2. Who needs cultural leadership?

Cultural leadership has been part of UK cultural policy and training discourse for less than a decade and a half. In that time investment in it has gone from being described as ‘necessary, and timely’ (Hewison & Holden 2002) to ‘hubris’ (Gordon & Stark 2010: 3.b.ii.5). The concept has also gone from being an area of crisis for the British cultural sector to being something that the country wants to export and in which UK national leadership can in fact be demonstrated. Meanwhile, the adoption of the concept in parts of Europe, Asia and Africa suggests that, while there may be cultural differences in terms of local interpretation, it has overall relevance for many more times and places than the particular context of a British arts management crisis. It can still be asked, however, why cultural leadership is necessary as a separate concept. What is the benefit of the association of the subsectors of culture under this heading? Can we not have arts, museums or libraries leadership – or just leadership?

There are several possible answers to these questions. Firstly, culture is no longer made up of just the arts, museums and libraries, even in public policy constructions. The Clore Leadership Programme’s remit has expanded in recent years to include digital arts, film and the creative industries (see 1.4.1 above). The concept of cultural leadership allowed a single intervention to respond to a multifaceted problem which would otherwise have required individual responses for every subsector, some of which (such as the creative industries) were in any case inconsistently defined and amorphous. Sometimes it makes sense to re-plaster the whole wall rather than fill each separate crack. The invention of ‘cultural leadership’ allowed the creation of a broadly inclusive programme without the need for continual redefinition or the contorted labelling of grey areas. In a sense, culture’s own lack of clear and fixed definition is helpful here, exploiting something that Pablo Rossello has noticed about cultural leadership - ‘the usefulness of vague terms’ (Rossello 2014: 14). More importantly, working on collective training outside the silos of individual cultural forms acknowledges the transferability of skills and careers while also offering economies of scale in terms of co-ordination and recruitment. This can be seen as particularly appropriate in a cultural sector where Ormston’s (2015) game of Twister (see 4.5.1 above) naturally stretches people across boundaries and between remits, but where a ‘culture of professionalism’ has meant that, at least in the past, ‘different parts of the sector believe that they have little to learn from each other’ (Hewison 2004: 164). Sue

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Hoyle reinforces the importance of this cross-fertilisation in the current philosophy of the Clore programme, particularly so as ‘to challenge people who are working in culture in its broadest sense to rediscover their own creativity, which I think will inform their leadership, but also to engage more fully with artists’ (Hoyle 2014b: 14). Ultimately, whatever philosophical critique can be made of cultural leadership as a construct, it has gained traction and forged meaning in a range of environments. The task remains to understand and relate these meanings and to see what practical use can be made of them for cultural expression and development. Hoyle herself strongly resists the idea that cultural leadership is some kind of British export, or that Clore could itself run programmes in other countries, stressing instead the need for processes of ‘exchange’:

… we’re very happy to share our experience with anybody who wants to know what it is, but we wouldn’t want to sort of duplicate or impose it, because I think every context is different, and I think we can learn as much from other people as they can learn from us. (Hoyle 2014b: 10)

This begs the question of how the UK can learn from other contexts and through what mechanisms. Part of the answer could be provided through the interest being taken by international organisations such as International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA) and ENCATC, who are both running major events on cultural leadership during 2016.81 Whatever professional learning is available there is surely scope for a complementary research connection to investigate the international contexts and applications of cultural leadership and how the particular challenges of the British context may be better understood as a result. Even within the UK there is potential for increasing opportunity to learn from other professional contexts, with TBR’s research for Clore highlighting the contemporary need to be able to collaborate and work more effectively across disciplinary boundaries (TBR 2013: 4). This suggests a growing awareness in the sector that it must look beyond itself, in whatever direction, for ways to address its leadership challenges. The interviews for this research also indicate the complexity of the challenges facing cultural leaders at this

81 The ENCATC seminar in March 2016 is announced at: http://europeanculturalleadership.org/work-in- progress/welcome-to-our-open-seminars/ and IFACCA’s October 2016 summit theme was launched in November 2015 at: http://ifacca.org/announcements/2015/11/20/theme-and-website-7th-world- summit-arts-and-cultur/ (both accessed 24 November 2015).

201 juncture, not just those from large scale institutions and national flagships but also those pioneering new models of work at different scales. The continuing need for skills development is a necessity for workers at all levels and the demand for cultural leadership development still evident by the end of the coalition government period is nothing to do with sectoral hubris but everything to do with securing its future survival.

6.4. Limitations of the research and further questions

6.4.1. Equality and cultural leadership

This research has focused on the discourse of cultural leadership: the way it is written about, discussed, constructed and experienced. It has been concerned with the meaning of the concept and the values associated with it. It does not analyse the constitution of the cultural workforce or issues of access to leadership roles within the sector, important though these issues are. Certain issues are ripe for further investigation in this area. For example, TBR’s research for the Clore Leadership Programme contrasts the predominance of women as attendees of cultural leadership training with the lack of women in senior leadership roles in the cultural sector identified in other research (TBR 2013: 27). This suggests a need for better statistical and empirical understand of glass ceilings in the cultural sector, and raises questions about how successful current leadership training actually is in matching individuals to the requirements of sectoral organisations – and whether those requirements are themselves in particular ways gendered.

Similar questions can also be asked in relation to race, class and disability, both in terms of access to jobs and to training opportunities. TBR’s survey indicates that black and minority ethnic leaders are disproportionately affected by issues such as caring responsibilities and time constraints when it comes to attending training, while those with disabilities encounter barriers in terms of course availability and cost (ibid. 24, table 4). Recent controversy in the UK about the dependence by some arts organisations on unpaid internships and the effect this has on social access to creative careers opens up further complex questions about access and ownership in cultural

202 institutions.82 Meanwhile, the Warwick Commission points to a perceived under- representation of those from low-income backgrounds in educational courses feeding the cultural and creative industries, although its report concedes that systematic research is needed to investigate this (Warwick Commission 2015: 47). These questions undoubtedly impact in turn on the cultural sector’s questions of legitimacy. There is also potential for comparing the experiences of different countries internationally around these issues.

6.4.2. Range and scope of contributors

While the cohort of research interviewees was carefully selected to produce an informative range of overlapping perspectives, this relatively small sample of cultural professionals obviously has certain limitations. One aim was to find individuals who individually had different hats to wear and had experience of different roles in relation to institutions and funding structures. A product of this is that none of them are currently full time practicing artists, despite the fact that several of them had been at previous stages of their careers (as discussed in 4.7 above). It is therefore suggested that any follow up work around the relationship of artists to the concept of cultural leadership should certainly take into account the perspective of those actively trying to earn a living as artists in contemporary conditions. Similarly, while the entire cohort had experience of working at different levels within the cultural system, none were currently junior staff members in cultural organisations or, for that matter, project participants or non-specialist trustees. Again, the particular perspective of those currently occupying such roles could diversify views further, particularly when it comes to assessing the experience of being confronted with particular leadership styles within organisations. It would also be interesting to explore the expectations that these individuals have of their organisational leaders in relation to the language that the latter use to describe their own work.

There is also potential to analyse and compare the lessons from different international contexts and from the various cultural leadership development programmes operating

82 See, for example: http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/lso-revamp-intern-scheme-following- protests (accessed 24 November 2015). The Warwick Commission (2015: 35) also identifies low-paid internships as a problem for diversification of the cultural workforce.

203 worldwide. This research has involved a handful of individuals from outside the UK as well as others with international experience but there is scope for much wider input in terms of understanding the applicable definitions, challenges and assumptions of a possible international discourse of cultural leadership. As more programmes emerge there is also scope for comparing course content and trainee experience.

In addition to these additional viewpoints, up to date statistical information around pay and conditions within the UK cultural sector would be useful as a tool for establishing in what ways career prospects for arts and culture professionals have developed or declined during the last decade. Hewison (2004) quotes, for example, average pay for key arts and museums posts in comparison to teachers. Any changes to this picture would be informative in terms of assessing structural developments in the cultural sector and the overall status of such work. It is notable that while a review such as the Warwick Commission’s report on cultural value quotes a range of statistical information about access to education and creative activities as well as funding levels, it makes no mention of sectoral wages except to observe the tendency for artists not to receive fees for exhibiting in galleries (Warwick Commission 2015: 35).

6.5. The exchange of action and influence

The model developed in this research shows cultural leadership to be made up both of the actions of cultural sector leaders and the wider influences on cultural development which are beyond the control of such actors. Although outside individual or even collective control, these factors may themselves be influenced in turn by the actions of sectoral leaders. Cultural leaders are therefore understood neither as freely autonomous actors nor as passive receivers in a deterministic system. They appear rather as active receptors, attuned to external circumstances in order to operate as effectively as possible among them, constructing a pragmatic form of autonomy through heteronomy. Moreover, leadership does not only take place through individual action within organisations but also derives from individual action taking place externally, as well as being a product of relationships and collective will internally. Viewing cultural leadership through such a lens allows for a sceptical but balanced analysis of individual impact. Systemic factors can be taken into account, highlighting

204 the extent to which sectoral leaders are enabled or limited by external processes. By the same token, it also does justice to the complexity of these leadership roles and identifies the broader forms of social and political significance that cultural actors can embody. A meaningful understanding of cultural leadership therefore depends on the exchange permanently underway between these tangled spheres of action and influence. This research has attempted to make sense of the forms of discourse which make up this exchange, encountering leadership not as an end in itself but as an element of human action. Cultural leadership comes into focus among the processes and practices through which the boundlessness, plurality and unpredictability of cultural life are encountered and, at best, embraced.

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